Type	SEP, BA, MA, DA
Supervisor	Prof. Dr.-Ing. Alois Knoll
Advisor	Dipl.-Inf. Simon Barner
Research Area	Embedded Systems
Associated Project	EasyKit
Programming Language	C/C++
Usefull skills	Low-level programming, Electronics
Printable version	PDF

Description

The Cell processor basically consists of four components

• external input and output structures
• Main processor: Power Processing Element (PPE), based on PowerPCMain processor
• 8 Co-processors: Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs)
• Highspeed bus: Element Interconnect Bus (EIB)

Computationally intensive tasks can be computed in parallel by the PPE and the SPEs that can exchange data with main memory or external data storage using DMA (direct memory access). Since a SPE's load/store operations can only access local memory, they entirely rely on DMA to send or receive data.

In the course of this student project, the following items will be dealt with:

• Setup of IBM's development toolchain on a Playstation 3 (see below)
• Definition suitable benchmark applications and implementation of a demonstrator

If the project is to be performed as a MA or DA, additional emphasis will be put on conceptional / theoretical aspects such as the evaluation of existing software development approaches for the Cell architecture.

Literature

• Schneider, Scott; Yeom, Jae-Seung; Nikolopoulos, Dimitrios S., "Programming Multiprocessors with Explicitly Managed Memory Hierarchies," Computer , vol.42, no.12, pp.28-34, Dec. 2009
• Programming high-performance applications on the Cell BE processor. An introduction to Linux on the PLAYSTATION 3
• An Open Source Environment for Cell Broadband Engine System Software
• A new record for the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) using PS/3

Related projects:

• Evaluation of Frameworks for Parallel Applications
• Evaluation of a Multi-Core Architecture for a Quadrocopter Control Application