Academy of Sciences

The Cell Broad Engine (BE) Processor has unique memory access architecture besides its powerful computing engines. Many computing-intensive applications have been ported to Cell/BE successfully. But memory-intensive applications are rarely investigated except for several micro benchmarks. Since Cell/BE has powerful software visible DMA engine, this paper studies on whether Cell/BE is suit for applica-tions with large amount of random memory accesses. Two benchmarks, GUPS and SSCA#2, are used. The latter is a rather complex one that in representative of real world graph analysis applications. We find both benchmarks have good performance on Cell/BE based IBM QS20/22. Com-pared with 2 conventional multi-processor systems with the same core/thread number, GUPS is about 40-80 % fast and SSCA#2 about 17-30 % fast. The dynamic load balanc-ing and software pipeline for optimizing SSCA#2 are intro-duced. Based on the experiment, the potential of Cell/BE for random access is analyzed in detail as well as its limita-tions of memory controller, atomic engine and TLB manage-ment.Our research shows although more programming effort are needed, Cell/BE has the potencial for irregular memory access applications