Not wanting to sound too negative, but total nonsense concept.
First of all this 'sequoia' claims to be a new programming language. Meaning
it'll take a year or 30
until some good compilers for it are there, provided someone is going to
support it.
Which isn't going to happen.
The parallellization basically is based upon complex assumptions for
programmers. So for programmers they don't actually make it easier than
trivial parallellization is via C/C++ function calls.
The sequoia parallellization basically is simplistically over for loops that
a programmer himself can
trivially parallellize too.
Further the optimization of sequoia simply doesn't happen. They assume
"kernel libraries" solve the
problem. Interestingly it mentions explicitly:
"if kernel libraries could be obtained, such as FFTW and the intel MKL for
PCs, or the IBM SPE matrix library for Cell, we call these libraries from
Sequoia leaf tasks".
In short if some algorithm has not been implemented for sequoia, sequoia is
unusable.
Others may do the work as usual to promote sequoia.
Not gonna happen.
If a processor has a lot of cores and isn't having a native support from
intel nor ibm, then it is going to fail.
Lot of assumptions. In the end what you need is a 1000 compiler personnel
who optimize a compiler,
especially when it has to be built from ground up.
Who is going to pay them for sequoia?
ANL (Another new language) is what everyone writing things on paper in an
university likes to invent,
but that's not going to help us execute our programs easier let alone
faster.
There is so many little tricks in implementation of a compiler that it is a
sheer impossible task for a few people to create an efficient compiler. Why
do all those paper guys not practical help to optimize GCC,
which definitely needs some help, especially a 64 bits port that works in 64
bits windows at x86-64.
Right now there is only some possibilities to create 32 bits gcc exes for
windows using for example
mingw with their msys.
I can garantuee you that those paper guys keep writing such papers and show
up with ANL.
Vincent
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Shewmaker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <beowulf@beowulf.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 7:05 AM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Has anyone actually seen/used a cell system?
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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