Characterizing the Basic Synchronization and Communication Operations in Dual Cell-Based Blades

Abstract

The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) is a heterogeneous chip-multiprocessor (CMP) architecture to offer very high performance, especially on game and multimedia applications. The singularity of its architecture, nine cores of two different types, along with the variety of synchronization and communication primitives offered to programmers, make the task of developing efficient applications very challenging. This situation gets even worse when we consider Dual Cell-Based Blade architectures where two separate Cells can be linked together through a dedicated high-speed interface. In this work, we present a characterization of the main synchronization and communication primitives provided by dual Cell-based blades under varying workloads. In particular, we focus on the DMA transfer mechanism, the mailboxes, the signals, the read-modify-write atomic operations, and the time taken by thread creation. Our performance results expose the bottlenecks and asymmetries of these platforms which must be taken into account by programmers for improving the efficiency of their applications.

This work has been jointly supported by the Spanish MEC and European Comission FEDER funds under grants “Consolider Ingenio-2010 CSD2006-00046” and “TIN2006-15516-C04-03”.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.