QCD on the Cell Broadband Engine
Nils Meyer, Francesco Belletti, Gianfranco Bilardi, M. Drochner, N. Eicker, Z. Fodor, Dieter Hierl, Hani Kaldass, Thomas Lippert, T. Maurer, Andrea Nobile, Dirk Pleiter, Andreas Schäfer A, F. Schifano, Hubert Simma, Stefan Solbrig, T. Streuer, R. Tripiccione, Tilo Wettig · Proceedings of The XXV International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory — PoS(LATTICE 2007) · 2008
We evaluate IBM's Enhanced Cell Broadband Engine (BE) as a possible building block of a new generation of lattice QCD machines.The Enhanced Cell BE will provide full support of doubleprecision floating-point arithmetics, including IEEE-compliant rounding.We have developed a performance model and applied it to relevant lattice QCD kernels.The performance estimates are supported by micro-and application-benchmarks that have been obtained on currently available Cell BE-based computers, such as IBM QS20 blades and PlayStation 3. The results are encouraging and show that this processor is an interesting option for lattice QCD applications.For a massively parallel machine on the basis of the Cell BE, an application-optimized network needs to be developed.