On the random access performance of Cell Broadband Engine with graph analysis application

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the Cell Broadband Engine's performance on random memory access applications using benchmarks GUPS and SSCA#2, showing it outperforms traditional multi-processor systems despite certain limitations.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of Cell/BE's suitability for irregular memory access applications, including optimization techniques and performance comparisons.

Findings

GUPS is 40-80% faster on Cell/BE

SSCA#2 is 17-30% faster on Cell/BE

Cell/BE has potential for irregular memory access applications

Abstract

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.