Cetra: A trace and analysis framework for the evaluation of Cell BE systems

The cell broadband engine architecture (CBEA) is an heterogeneous multiprocessor architecture developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM. The major implementation of this architecture is the cell broadband engine (cell for short), a processor that contains one generic PowerPC core and eight accelerators. The cell is targeted at high-performance computing systems and consumer-level devices that have high computational requirements. The workloads for the former are generally run in a queue-based environment while those for the latter are multiprogrammed. Applications for the cell are composed of multiple parallel tasks: one runs on the PowerPC core and one or more run on the accelerators. The operating system (OS) is in charge of scheduling these tasks on top of the physical processors, and such scheduling decisions become critical in multiprogrammed environments. System developers need a way to analyze how user applications behave in these conditions to be able to tune the OS internal algorithms. This article presents Cetra, a new tool-set that allows system developers to study how cell workloads interact with Linux, the OS kernel. First, we outline the major features of Cetra and provide a detailed description of its internals. Then, we demonstrate the usefulness of Cetra by presenting a case study that shows the features of the tool-set and allows us to compare the results to those provided by other performance analysis tools available in the market. At last, we describe another case study in which we discovered a scheduling starvation bug using Cetra.