Introduction to the cell multiprocessor
IBM Journal of Research and Development - POWER5 and packaging
CellStats: A Tool to Evaluate the Basic Synchronization and Communication Operations of the Cell BE
PDP '08 Proceedings of the 16th Euromicro Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP 2008)
Euro-Par '09 Proceedings of the 15th International Euro-Par Conference on Parallel Processing
HiPEAC'10 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on High Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers
Stencil computations on heterogeneous platforms for the Jacobi method: GPUs versus Cell BE
The Journal of Supercomputing
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The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) is a heterogeneous chip-multiprocessor (CMP) architecture to offer very high performance, especially on game and multimedia applications. The singularity of its architecture, nine cores of two different types, along with the variety of synchronization and communication primitives offered to programmers, make the task of developing efficient applications very challenging. This situation gets even worse when we consider Dual Cell-Based Blade architectures where two separate Cells can be linked together through a dedicated high-speed interface. In this work, we present a characterization of the main synchronization and communication primitives provided by dual Cell-based blades under varying workloads. In particular, we focus on the DMA transfer mechanism, the mailboxes, the signals, the read-modify-write atomic operations, and the time taken by thread creation. Our performance results expose the bottlenecks and asymmetries of these platforms which must be taken into account by programmers for improving the efficiency of their applications.