[osuosl-powerdev] Feedback on Cell usage

Jack Lloyd lloyd at randombit.net
Tue Oct 20 19:04:16 UTC 2009


On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 11:30:49AM -0700, Lance Albertson wrote:
> We might be losing the Cell based machines we currently have from IBM
> soon and we need to know what you all have been doing on them. Can you
> please email me any projects that you are using the cells for? Anything
> interesting would be helpful.
> 

I have not had the time to go beyond simple tests/hello world-ish
applications (and testing that my some existing applications of mine
worked OK on the PPU, which isn't that interesting of course
especially since I knew they worked on G4/G5 procs). At some point I
was hoping to have the time to work on SPU versions of some SIMD code
I had previously written using SSE2 for error correction and
cryptography to see what kind of throughput one can achieve on Cell,
but nothing existing I can point to.

One usage of SPU versions of the code I had in mind was for use in the
Tahoe-LAFS (http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe) as it uses a number of
computationaly intensive algorithms in ways that would be easy to
parallelize.

-Jack


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