DocumentCode :
3057498
Title :
CellStats: A Tool to Evaluate the Basic Synchronization and Communication Operations of the Cell BE
Author :
Abellán, José L. ; Fernández, Juan ; Acacio, Manuel E.
Author_Institution :
Univ. de Murcia, Murcia
fYear :
2008
fDate :
13-15 Feb. 2008
Firstpage :
261
Lastpage :
268
Abstract :
The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) is a recent heterogeneous chip-multiprocessor (CMP) architecture jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba to offer very high performance, especially on game and multimedia applications. The significant number of processor cores that it contains (nine in its first generation), along with their heterogeneity (they are of two different types) and the variety of synchronization and communication primitives offered to programmers, make the task of developing efficient applications for the Cell BE very challenging. In this work, we present CellStats, a tool aimed at characterizing the performance of the main synchronization and communication primitives provided by the Cell BE under varying workloads. In particular, the current implementation of CellStats allows to evaluate the DMA transfer mechanism, the read-modify-write atomic operations, the mailboxes, the signals and the time taken by thread creation. As an example of application of CellStats, we present a characterization of the Cell BE incorporated into the PlayStation 3. From this characterization, we extract some recommendations that can help programmers to identify the most appropriate primitive under different assumptions.
Keywords :
microprocessor chips; multiprocessing systems; Cell Broadband Engine; Cellstats; DMA transfer; IBM; PlayStation 3; Sony; Toshiba; heterogeneity; heterogeneous chip-multiprocessor; processor cores; Central Processing Unit; Computer aided instruction; Computer architecture; Concurrent computing; Engines; Frequency synchronization; Microprocessors; Parallel processing; Programming profession; Yarn;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing, 2008. PDP 2008. 16th Euromicro Conference on
Conference_Location :
Toulouse
ISSN :
1066-6192
Print_ISBN :
978-0-7695-3089-5
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/PDP.2008.49
Filename :
4457132
Link To Document :
بازگشت