Using advanced compiler technology to exploit the performance of the Cell Broadband Engine™ architecture
| Autor: | Alexandre E. Eichenberger, John Kevin Patrick O'Brien, Daniel A. Prener, Peng Zhao, Amy Wang, Peng Wu, R. Koo, Roch Georges Archambault, Yaoqing Gao, Tong Chen, Peter Howland Oden, Michael K. Gschwind, J. C. Shepherd, Byoungro So, Tao Zhang, Kathryn M. O'Brien, Zehra Sura |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2006 |
| Předmět: |
Game physics
General Computer Science Exploit Computer science business.industry Computation computer.software_genre Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design Theoretical Computer Science Computational Theory and Mathematics Embedded system Broadband Code generation Compiler Cache business computer Direct memory access Software Information Systems |
| Zdroj: | IBM Systems Journal. 45:59-84 |
| ISSN: | 0018-8670 |
| DOI: | 10.1147/sj.451.0059 |
| Popis: | The continuing importance of game applications and other numerically intensive workloads has generated an upsurge in novel computer architectures tailored for such functionality. Game applications feature highly parallel code for functions such as game physics, which have high computation and memory requirements, and scalar code for functions such as game artificial intelligence, for which fast response times and a full-featured programming environment are critical. The Cell Broadband EngineTM architecture targets such applications, providing both flexibility and high performance by utilizing a 64-bit multithreaded PowerPC® processor element (PPE) with two levels of globally coherent cache and eight synergistic processor elements (SPEs), each consisting of a processor designed for streaming workloads, a local memory, and a globally coherent DMA (direct memory access) engine. Growth in processor complexity is driving a parallel need for sophisticated compiler technology. In this paper, we present a variety of compiler techniques designed to exploit the performance potential of the SPEs and to enable the multilevel heterogeneous parallelism found in the Cell Broadband Engine architecture. Our goal in developing this compiler has been to enhance programmability while continuing to provide high performance. We review the Cell Broadband Engine architecture and present the results of our compiler techniques, including SPE optimization, automatic code generation, single source parallelization, and partitioning. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|