SCOP3: A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the PlayStation 3

by Alfredo Buttari. Piotr Luszczek. Jakub Kurzak. Jack Dongarra. George Bosilca.

As much as the Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) has a range of interesting features, its heart, the CELL processor is what the fuss is all about. CELL, a shorthand for CELL Broadband Engine Architecture, also abbreviated as CELL BE Architecture or CBEA, is a microprocessor jointly developed by the alliance of Sony, Toshiba and IBM, known as STI. The work started in 2000 at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas, and for more than four years involved around 400 engineers and consumed close to half a billion dollars. The initial goal was to outperform desktop systems, available at the time of completion of the design, by an order of magnitude, through a dramatic increase in performance per chip area and per unit of power consumption. A quantum leap in performance would be achieved by abandoning the obsolete architectural model where performance relied on mechanisms like cache hierarchies and speculative execution, which those days brought diminishing returns in performance gains. Instead, the new architecture would rely on a heterogeneous multi-core design, with highly efficient data processors being at the heart. Their architecture would be stripped of costly and inefficient features like address translation, instruction reordering, register renaming and branch prediction. Instead they would be given powerful short vector SIMD capabilities and a massive register file. Cache hierarchies would be replaced by small and fast local memories and powerful DMA engines. This design approach resulted in a 200 million transistors chip, which today delivers performance barely approachable by its billion transistor counterparts and is available to the broad computing community in a truly off-the-shelf manner via a $600 gaming console. [via]

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