from left to right: Flavio Carazato, Prof. Hirata, Robert Szabo, Daniel Baggio, André Keller Abade, Prof. Yano, Igor Aquino, Thomás Dias

Introduction

In June, 23rd, 2008 we had the pleasure to receive the IBMer Ph. D. Robert M. Szabo, from Cell Ecosystem Development Systems and Mr. Flavio Carazato, from University Relations of IBM Brazil. They have come to see our Cell related research. Our presentation is available here. We had the opportunity to show our progress with Algorithms, Computational Fluid Dynamics, and Antenna Design (parallel quadrature). We were also able to show our 5 Ps3 cluster. Besides reporting our results we had the opportunity to receive important information from Bob, which will be explored in detail below.

News from Cell Ecosystem

Robert has provided us some of the most useful links he has collected about Cell related research. Starting from the must developerworks, he told us to check some of the performance differences using different cell compilers.

We are very familiar to the RapidMind platform, but Bob has also showed us an alternative, which is the Gedae system.

He also mentioned the Mentor Graphics . There's a paper about Nucleus OS: Optimizing Cell/B.E. Performance with Mentor Graphics’ Nucleus OS - fill form to get the paper.

Paper abstract: "The Nucleus OS can significantly improve the performance, response times and memory system utilization in many complex systems, where other bulkier OS choices add significant overhead and do not provide real-time response. This paper discusses how the smaller footprint of Nucleus and its real-time capabilities can address improved resource utilization to optimize PPE and SPE interaction."

IBM and Wind River are adapting the Cell/B.E. for a wide range of aerospace and defence applications.

Bob mentioned that MIT Open Courseware would have a course about Cell, but the closest I have found was this.

Georgia Tech also maintains a wiki to Cell BE. Besides the wiki, lots of open source libraries developed by Georgia Tech are available, among of them: jpeg, fft, gzip, and mpeg2.

IBM has also developed a redbook about Cell, which is called "Programming the Cell Broadband Engine Examples and Best Practices"

Another library that has been adapted to Cell was the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms. A link about it is available here.

Another very interesting use of Cell was through IBM's Dynamic Application Virtualization (DAV) through which technology, an Excel spreadsheet could be connected to some SystemZ or Cell cluster, transparently to the user. Their example was with Black Scholes if I am not mistaken.

Another interesting information was about a Brazilian Game Developer, Hoplon Infotainment, which seems to be building its infrastructure with QS20.

Robert also mentioned the Accelerated Library Framework (ALF) in the IBM SDK for Multicore Acceleration 3.0. There is also an ALF for Cell/B.E. Programmer's Guide and API Reference, Version 3.0, check resources of this link.

The University of Maryland Baltimore is studying aerospace and cell related subjects.

The University of Basel is studying cancer through cell.

A very interesting idea, by Sheldon Brown is the scalable city .

There are some cell related info here.

Robert has also mentioned about GLIMPSES a tool for Memory and program behavior estimation for SPEs.

Another great repository for cell related publications is available here.

Cell QS20/QS22 access

One of the most interesting links that Bob has given us was a free access to Georgia Tech Cell clusters. In order to access it, one needs to fill this form. After that, an user is added so that remote access is available. Instructions for using the cluster are available here.