Practical Computing On The Cell Broadband Engine

3Uactical Computing on the Cell Broadband Engine “This page left intentionally blank.” Sandeep Koranne Practical Computing on the Cell Broadband Engine Sandeep Koranne 2906 Bellevue Court West Linn, OR 97068 USA [email protected] ISBN 978-1-4419-0307-5 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-0308-2 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0308-2 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2009928039 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identifie as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) I would like to dedicate this book to the early pioneers of high-performance computing, whose untiring effort to extract the most out of computer architectures, continues to improve the quality of our lives to this day. “This page left intentionally blank.” Preface It has been just over four years since the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) was introduced at the International Solid-State Circuits (ISSC) Conference in February of 2005. A number of technical papers at that conference described the inner workings of the architecture, and its first implementation. The chip’s computational prowess was (and remains to be) second to none for the sort of applications which matched the architectures intent (and then some1 ). In the years that have passed, the wonderment has been replaced by fascination, and curiosity by admiration. The Cell Broadband Engine Architecture and its first implementation in the Cell processor exhibit exquisite, and mathematical Pareto-optimality (probably by design) across many quantitative (eg., SPE area, power, PPE EMT instruction-queue and TLB design) and other more subjective areas.