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LBNL: The Potential of the Cell Processor for Scientific Computing
Though it was designed as the heart of the upcoming Sony PlayStation3 game console, the STI Cell processor has created quite a stir in the computational science community, where the processor's potential as a building block for high performance computers has been widely discussed and speculated upon.To evaluate Cell's potential, computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory evaluated the processor's performance in running several scientific application kernels, then compared this performance against other processor architectures. [..] "Overall results demonstrate the tremendous potential of the Cell architecture for scientific computations in terms of both raw performance and power efficiency," the authors wrote in their paper. [b]"We also conclude that Cell's heterogeneous multi-core implementation is inherently better suited to the HPC environment than homogeneous commodity multi-core processors."[/b] [..] Posted by: 3dc 2006-05-28 |
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