Vector stream processing for effective application of heterogeneous parallelism
John C. Linford, Adrian Sandu · 2009
Heterogeneous multicore chipsets with many levels of parallelism are becoming increasingly common in high-performance computing systems. Effective use of parallelism in these new chipsets is paramount. We present a 3D chemical transport module optimized for the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA). By leveraging the heterogeneous parallelism of the Cell with a method we call vector stream processing, our transport module achieves performance comparable to two nodes of an IBM BlueGene/P, or eight Xeon cores, on a single Cell chip. Performance of the module on two CBEA systems, an IBM BlueGene/P, and an eight-core shared-memory Intel Xeon workstation are given.