[Beowulf] Cell programming

[Andrew Shewmaker]

On 3/20/07, Tim Wilcox <twilcox at terrasoftsolutions.com> wrote:

> It seems to me a good starting point is to divide a problem, say a CFD, into
> larger sections at the MPI layer and then a smaller division of the subset on
> the individual Cell processor.  This poses the issue of message passing
> between disparate SPUs.  Any input on the characteristics of how this may
> work and perform?

Hi Tim,

Have you read A Synchronous Mode MPI Implementation on the Cell BE™ Architecture

http://www.cs.fsu.edu/research/reports/TR-061215.pdf

or MPI microtask for programming the Cell Broadband Engine™ processor

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/451/ohara.html

I don't see any code available to download for those.

Cell SDK 2.1 includes the Accelerator Library and Framework (ALF), and the
documentation looks good.  I don't think it handles messages between SPUs,
but it does help out with things like double buffering.

I don't think that Sequoia http://sequoia.stanford.edu transfers data
between SPUs either.

Dr. Dobbs has an article on optimizing Breadth First Search on the Cell.
The authors describe how they implement an all-to-all exchange
amongst the SPUs.

http://www.ddj.com/dept/64bit/197801624?pgno=4

--
Andrew Shewmaker