Scientists adapt gaming processor for high-performance computing

PlayStation's chip in high-performance computing environments

When chips are put to other uses, sometimes goodness ensues - that's the conclusion of braniacs from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California about their experiments with Sony PlayStation 3's STI Cell processor and high-performance computing.

The STI Cell (developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM - the first letter of each making up the name) was originally developed for Sony's game console. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory proposed in a paper (PDF) to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that as the 'slowing pace of microprocessor performance improvements combined with ever increasing chip power demands' they are investigating the use of alternative architectures. The STI Cell processor is one of them.

To determine the Cell processor's potential for use in high-performance computing, the scientists ran several scientific applications on the processor and compared it to other processor architectures. Overall, they saw that the multicore implementation of the Cell processor was better suited to high-performance computing than that of commodity multicore processors.

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When chips are put to other uses, sometimes goodness ensues - that's the conclusion of braniacs from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California about their experiments with Sony PlayStation 3's STI Cell processor and high-performance computing.

The STI Cell (developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM - the first letter of each making up the name) was originally developed for Sony's game console. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory proposed in a paper (PDF) to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that as the 'slowing pace of microprocessor performance improvements combined with ever increasing chip power demands' they are investigating the use of alternative architectures. The STI Cell processor is one of them.

To determine the Cell processor's potential for use in high-performance computing, the scientists ran several scientific applications on the processor and compared it to other processor architectures. Overall, they saw that the multicore implementation of the Cell processor was better suited to high-performance computing than that of commodity multicore processors.

The Cell processor uses a PowerPC core that controls eight single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) cores called synergistic processing elements (SPE). Each SPE contains a synergistic processing unit (SPU), local memory and a memory flow controller. The scientists also found that the Cell processor will be cost-competitive with commodity CPUs because it will be produced in high volumes.

Although the Cell is a 32-bit architecture, the scientists said that with some modest changes, it would be able to handle the majority of 64-bit scientific applications.

They developed a performance model for Cell and compared it with AMD Opteron, Intel Itanium2 and Cray X1 processors.

Their tests found that on average, Cell is eight times faster and at least eight times more power efficient than current Opteron and Itanium processors.

You can learn more about STI Cell at IBM's Web site.

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