Cell-NPE (Numerical Performance Evaluation): Programming the IBM Cell Broadband Engine -- A General Parallelization Strategy

This report results from a contract tasking HPCC-Space GmbH as follows B. TECHNICAL PRPOPOSADESCRIPTION OF WORK Cell A Revolutionary High Performance Computing Platform On 29 June 2005 1, IBM has announced that is has partnered with Mercury Computer Systems, a maker of specialized computers. The Cell chip provides massive floating-point capability and scalability for a variety of applications. It is a general-purpose processor and provides a high cost performance ratio GFlops. In brief, it has the capability, because of its networking features, to provide a supercomputer in a nutshell. This signals an important shift in the computing industry away from the traditional processor technology dominated by Intel. While in the past, the development of computing power has been driven by desktop applications gaming, and other data-intensive applications are now driving the performance gains in computing. A basic Cell processor is expected to deliver clock speeds of 4 GHz per core and contains nine cores, so it has about 10 times the processing power of a standard desktop PC processor. The applications that need that level of performance are mainly in the area of engineering and scientific computing. So far pricing was not revealed, but it is believed that the Cell will cost about 30 in game consoles. The average PC processor today costs about 150 to 200. IBM has been developing the Cell in a joint venture with Sony and Toshiba since 2001. Manufacturing of the Cell started earlier this year at IBMs East Fishkill N.Y.. The Cell processor is a radical new design. It incorporates a lot of additional number crunching and communications technology onto one chip that normally is spread among a set of chips. This produces a far more powerful package.