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Summary: J Supercomput (2010) 53: 247268
DOI 10.1007/s11227-009-0292-7
Characterizing the basic synchronization and
communication operations in Dual Cell-based Blades
through CellStats
José L. Abellán · Juan Fernández ·
Manuel E. Acacio
Published online: 1 April 2009
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009
Abstract The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) is a heterogeneous chip-multiproc-
essor (CMP) architecture to offer very high performance, especially on game and
multimedia applications. The singularity of its architecture, nine cores of two differ-
ent types, along with the variety of synchronization and communication primitives
offered to programmers, make the task of developing efficient applications very chal-
lenging. This situation gets even worse when dual Cell-based blade platforms are
considered, where two separate Cells can be linked together through a dedicated
high-speed interface. In this work, we present a characterization of the main syn-
chronization and communication primitives provided to programmers in the context
of a dual Cell-based blade under varying workloads through our CellStats tool. In
particular, we focus on the DMA transfer mechanism, the mailboxes, the signals, the
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