1 research outputs found
On the random access performance of Cell Broadband Engine with graph analysis application
The Cell Broad Engine (BE) Processor has unique memory access architecture
besides its powerful computing engines. Many computing-intensive applications
have been ported to Cell/BE successfully. But memory-intensive applications are
rarely investigated except for several micro benchmarks. Since Cell/BE has
powerful software visible DMA engine, this paper studies on whether Cell/BE is
suit for applica- tions with large amount of random memory accesses. Two
benchmarks, GUPS and SSCA#2, are used. The latter is a rather complex one that
in representative of real world graph analysis applications. We find both
benchmarks have good performance on Cell/BE based IBM QS20/22. Com- pared with
2 conventional multi-processor systems with the same core/thread number, GUPS
is about 40-80% fast and SSCA#2 about 17-30% fast. The dynamic load balanc- ing
and software pipeline for optimizing SSCA#2 are intro- duced. Based on the
experiment, the potential of Cell/BE for random access is analyzed in detail as
well as its limita- tions of memory controller, atomic engine and TLB manage-
ment.Our research shows although more programming effort are needed, Cell/BE
has the potencial for irregular memory access applications.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure