A programming example: Large FFT on the Cell broadband engine. GSPx 2005

The Cell Broadband Engine (CBE, shortname “Cell”) is a nine-core implementation of the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA), including a 64-bit Power Processor Element (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs). We apply this processor’s computational power to the calculation of a large FFT, comprising 16 million (224) single-precision complex samples. We present an overview of the CBE, discuss Cell code development methodology, explore the challenges and the tradeoffs of this particular task, describe some implementation details, and present results