A Parallel Monte Carlo Implementation on the Cell Broadband Engine

The Cell Broadband Engine is a heterogeneous multi-core processor architecture thattrades ease-of-programming for high performance. While primarily featured in theSony PlayStation 3 (PS3) for high-end games, it is a promising technology for scientistsworking with computationally heavy numerical methods. This paper presents threeimplementations of a Monte Carlo simulation of a system of charged particles on thePS3. The first method, while easy to implement and use, did not yield anyperformance advantage over conventional x86 processors. The second method ranmore than twice as fast on the PS3 as a comparable code on a 1.86 GHz Intel Xeonmachine but could run only a limited problem size. The third program ran over sixtimes faster than the x86 reference system and could handle any problem up to thesaturation of the PS3 main memory. The final program is also suitable for a cluster ofPlayStations and is easily adaptable to work on a distributed computing framework