CELL processor programming

Location: ENSEEIHT

morning: course in room A202
afternoon: hands-on in room C303

Organisers

Alvaro L.G.A. Coutinho (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brasil)
(P. and M. Curie University, Paris, France)
Manoel T.F. Cunha (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brasil)
Bertrand Cirou (CINES, Montpellier, France)
Diep Nguyen Hong (ENS Lyon, France)

Duration

1 full day

To whom we offer the tutorial?

To those scientists who want to understand the CELL mechanism and want to know how to program efficiently the CELL architecture to achieve a high level of performance.

Contents of the tutorial:

Morning: (3 hours)

Part 1
The first part will be devoted to an overview of architecture of CELL BE processor. The processor organization between the PPE and the 8 SPE will be describe in details. The main libraries will be presented.
Part 2
The second part will present the base of CELL programming with a low level point of view. We will point out the CELL threads which are different from the POSIX thread, the data exchanges between the PPE and the SPE through mailboxes system and DMA channel. This last point is not simple and examples will illustrate the talk.
Part 3
The CELL processor power is obtained by using SIMD instructions on the SPEs. The third part of the tutorial, the SIMD instructions set will be presented and recipes will be given to optimize code source and to tend toward the peak rate.

Afternoon : (3 hours)

The afternoon will be devoted to practical works. Through an internet connection, the participants will use a computer based on CELL processors in the CINES center. A set of exercises on communications inside a CELL processors, SIMD optimisation and performance measurement will be realised.