High performance computing on Cell B.E. processors

摘要

High performance computing aims at maximizing the performance of grand challenge problems such as protein folding and accurate real time weather prediction. Where in the past, performance improvements were obtained by aggressive frequency scaling using microarchitecture and manufacturing techniques, technology limits require future performance improvements be obtained from exploiting parallelism with a multi-core design approach. The Cell Broadband Engine is an exciting new execution platform answering this design challenge for compute-intensive applications that reflects both the requirements of future computational workloads and manufacturing constraints. The Cell B.E. is a heterogeneous chip multiprocessor architecture with compute accelerators achieving in excess of 200 GFlop per chip.