QCD on the Cell Broadband Engine
Abstract
We evaluate IBM's Enhanced Cell Broadband Engine (BE) as a possible building block of a new generation of lattice QCD machines. The Enhanced Cell BE will provide full support of double-precision floating-point arithmetics, including IEEE-compliant rounding. We have developed a performance model and applied it to relevant lattice QCD kernels. The performance estimates are supported by micro- and application-benchmarks that have been obtained on currently available Cell BE-based computers, such as IBM QS20 blades and PlayStation 3. The results are encouraging and show that this processor is an interesting option for lattice QCD applications. For a massively parallel machine on the basis of the Cell BE, an application-optimized network needs to be developed.
Cite
@article{arxiv.0710.2442,
title = {QCD on the Cell Broadband Engine},
author = {F. Belletti and G. Bilardi and M. Drochner and N. Eicker and Z. Fodor and D. Hierl and H. Kaldass and T. Lippert and T. Maurer and N. Meyer and A. Nobile and D. Pleiter and A. Schaefer and F. Schifano and H. Simma and S. Solbrig and T. Streuer and R. Tripiccione and T. Wettig},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0710.2442},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
7 pages, 3 figures, contribution to Lattice 2007 (Regensburg, Germany)