Parallel edge detection on the multi-core cell broadband engine

The IBM Cell Broadband Engine (BE) is a multi-core processor with a PowerPC host processor (PPE) and 8 synergic processor engines (SPEs). The Cell BE architecture is designed to improve upon conventional processors in terms of memory latency, bandwidth and power computation. In this paper, we discuss the parallelization, implementation and performance of the edge detection image processing application on the IBM Cell BE. We report the edge detection performance measured on a computer with one Cell processor and with varying numbers of synergic processor engines enabled. These results were compared to the results obtained on the Cells single PPE with all 8 SPEs disabled. The results indicate that edge detection performs 10 times faster on the Cell BE than modern RISC processors.