Introduction to Programming High Performance Applications on the CELL Broadband Engine

Summary form only given. Programming the STI CELL processor is about successfully exploiting its potential for delivering very high performance. The purpose of this tutorial is to give the programmer practical guidelines for achieving this goal. We begin by a brief overview of the main CELL architectural features and its software development environment. Then we discuss three basic aspects of CELL programming: SPE SIMD kernel development (vectorization), SPE parallelization and intra-chip communication. We show how high performance SPE kernels are created by replacing scalar operations with vector ones, heavily unrolling loops, and exploiting dual-issue nature of the SPE architecture. We explain coding using SIMD C language extensions (intrinsics), as well as using assembly language and discuss aspects specific to code development in assembly. We present static performance analysis using the spu-timing tool. The presentation of intra-chip communication follows, with emphasis on DMA communication both for bulk data transfers as well as for synchronization. We discuss message size and alignment restrictions, enforcing of message ordering using barrier and fence mechanisms and creation of complex data transfers using DMA lists. We conclude the topic with guidelines on implementing pipelined processing with direct local store to local store communication. We discuss basic profiling techniques using the SPE decrementer. We conclude with a set of practical tips and tricks and a list of "gotchas" or common rookie mistakes. A brief overview of academic and commercial CELL programming packages follows, and a discussion of a real life example - scanning network traffic using DFA- based string matching. The tutorial ends with a presentation of techniques for programming multi-CELL systems using message passing with MPI.