Analyzing Use of OpenCL on the Cell Broadband Engine and a Proposal for OpenCL Extensions

Current processor architectures are diverse and heterogeneous. Examples include multicore chips, GPUs and the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE). The recent Open Compute Language (OpenCL) standard aims at efficiency and portability. This paper explores its efficiency when implemented on the CBE, without using CBE-specific features such as explicit asynchronous memory transfers. We based our experiments on two applications: matrix multiplication, and the client side of the Einstein@Home distributed computing project. Both were programmed in OpenCL, and then translated to the CBE. For matrix multiplication, we deployed different levels of OpenCL performance optimization, and observed that they pay off on the CBE. Fo