The Next Generation in Performance - serious computing on gaming hardware
Over the past few months we have been working on putting the eHiTS docking program on the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell B.E.). Many of you may not have heard of Cell B.E. but you have no doubt heard of Sony’s PS3s. The PS3 uses the Cell B.E. chips to perform very advanced graphical computations mainly for gaming applications. However, the Cell B.E. is one of the most advanced chips on the market and when programmed correctly can offer amazing performance improvements over traditional Intel / AMD processors. SimBioSys is proud that eHiTS is the first major docking program to take advantage of this new advance in computational power, with projected speed-ups of over 40x.
The parallel nature of the Cell B.E. combined with its ability to do vector calculations makes the processor ideal for correctly ported high performance computing applications. It is important to note that getting the full performance out of the the Cell B.E. architecture takes very different programming skills than traditional Intel / AMD processors. SimBioSys has worked closely with IBM and others in the Cell B.E. community to make sure we capitalize on that power. Currently there is a working eHiTS prototype on the Cell B.E. architecture with a planned release in the second quarter of 2008. For more information on Cell B.E. and eHiTS please see the whitepaper found:
http://www.simbiosys.ca/science/white_papers/eHiTS_on_the_Cell.pdf
February 24th, 2008 at 9:48 pm
I posted a quick note about programming on the Cell on the Chemistry Computing List, CCL. The following comment was made on the list and I thought readers here might be interested also [my response to follow].
Sent to CCL by: Jerome Kieffer [jerome.Kieffer-x-terre-adelie.org]
Nice paper …
Have you made some tests on QM codes ? because 1GB of memory is really
tiny for QM.
Best regards.
–
Jérôme KIEFFER : http://www.terre-adelie.org
February 24th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
We, personally, have not done any tests with QM codes on the Cell, however, currently the IBM QS21 already comes with 2GB, specs: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/qs21/
While the QS22 will have up to 16GB .
Another option is the mercury Cell Accelerator Board which has 1GB XDR + 4GB DDR2 RAM:
http://www.mc.com/microsites/cell/productdetails.aspx?id=2590
As I said, we haven’t done any tests of QM, but I feel the newer implementations will have the memory to handle these codes. Now learning to program on them in an optimal fashion is a different question.
February 28th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Hi Darryl,
as an ex-modeller and ex-gamer, I will keep two eyes on this. Don’t have time to play anymore, though, so no console for this generation.
Who knows, may be next time I’ll see your program(s) in the Original Play Station Magazine Demo DVD?
Luca