On 9/19/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
If this has already been discussed on the list, a pointer
to the thread would be appreciated!
Looking over the list I found a couple references to the
IBM cell processors being used in PS3. Has anyone had a
chance to actually use/test one of these systems yet?
Considering that the PS3 is supposed to be competing with
the XBOX 360 and the Wii, I assume that it's out, or that
someone has actually used one of these systems.
Can anyone point me to a url, or tell me what their
experience is with this technology? Is it as fast as
it's purported to be? Apparently RedHat is developing
EL 4.3 to run on the system?
Any input is appreciated,
People in Stanford's graphics lab are doing promising
work making the Cell easier to program.
They have been busy creating a programming language
called Sequoia that focuses on memory hierarchies. A
programmer defines a task that recursively decomposes
the input data until it reaches the bottom of the memory
hierarchy, where it runs an optimized kernel. The runtime
environment uses a specification of the memory hierarchy
for the generic PC cluster, Cell Blade Server, etc. In the
case of a cluster, the runtime is built on top of MPI. In the
case of a Cell Blade Server, the runtime manages task
overlays and asynchronous DMA transfers of the data.
They have a paper that explains it well and has some
interesting benchmarks.
http://sc06.supercomputing.org/schedule/pdf/pap225.pdf
And the public release of their compiler and runtime
system should be publically available soon. The site
does have some more documentation of Sequoia.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/sequoia/cgi-bin/
--
Andrew Shewmaker
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