CFD on the Sony PS3
Clarence O. E. Burg · 39th AIAA Fluid Dynamics Conference · 2009
The Sony PlayStation 3 uses the powerful Cell Broadband Engine processor which is used within the Department of Energy’s Roadrunner supercomputer, the world’s fastest. This revolutionary processor performs math intensive operations at roughly 10-50 times faster than current single-core PC processors, due to the vector-like operations of the processors and the use of specialized math co-processors. However, to take advantage of this processing power, a computationally-intensive code must be rewritten into a vector format and reorganized to access these co-processors. This paper describes the programming alterations required to port an existing 2D unstructured finite-volume flow solver to the Cell processor. The reduction in computation time for simulations running on the Sony PS3 is roughly a factor of 6 over the original non-vectorized code running on the PS3. Once the code has been ported to the Sony PS3 platform, it is expected that only minor alterations, in particular, compile-time alterations, would be necessary in order to run on other computational platforms based on the Cell processor.