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The Potential of Science With the Cell Processor

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the making-a-station-play dept.

prostoalex writes "High Performance Computing Newswire is running an article on a paper by computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They have evaluated the processor's performance in running several scientific application kernels, then compared this performance against other processor architectures. The full paper is available from Computer Science department at Berkeley."

5 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. What about the programmer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "The paper did a lot of hand-optimization, which is irrelevent to most programmers. "

    But not to programmers who do science.

    "What gcc -O3 does is way more importent then what an assembly wizard can do for most projects."

    Not an unsurmountable problem.

  2. Re:What about the compiler? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hand optimization _is_ relevant to scientific programmers

  3. Re:What about the compiler? by TommyBear · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hand optimizing code is what I do as a game developer and I can assure you that it is very relevant to my job.

  4. Re:What about the compiler? by samkass · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What seems to be more important than that is:

    "According to the authors, the current implementation of Cell is most often noted for its extremely high performance single-precision (32-bit) floating performance, but the majority of scientific applications require double precision (64-bit). Although Cell's peak double precision performance is still impressive relative to its commodity peers (eight SPEs at 3.2GHz = 14.6 Gflop/s), the group quantified how modest hardware changes, which they named Cell+, could improve double precision performance."

    So the Cell is great because there's going to be millions of them sold in PS3's so they'll be cheap. But it's only really great if a new custom variant is built. Sounds kind of contradictory.

    --
    E pluribus unum
  5. Ran simulations, not code by jmichaelg · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Lest anyone think they actually ran "several scientific application kernels" on the Cell/AMD/Intel chips, what they actually did was run simulations of several different tasks such as FFT and matrix multiplication. Since they didn't actually run the code, they had to guess as to some parameters like DMA overhead. They also came up with a couple of hypothetical Cell processors that dispatched double precision instructions differently than how the Cell actually does it and present those results as well. They also said that IBM ran some prototype hardware that came within 2% of their simulation results, though they didn't say which hypothetical Cell the prototype hardware was implementing.

    By the end of the article, I was looking for their idea of a hypothetical best-case pony.