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.
@cite_13: An improved hydrazine analyzer is disclosed wherein sample and electrolyte solutions are supplied from constant flow rate sources into a mixing chamber where they are premixed. The premixed combination of electrolyte and sample is then passed through a sensing chamber having a sensing thimble disposed therein. The thimble is of a porous material having a platinum wire electrode wound about the outside thereof and having a silver wire inserted into silver chloride salt on the inside thereof to form a reference half cell. As the electrolyte-sample mixture passes through the sensing chamber, a portion of the fluid passes from the outside of the thimble to the inside of the thimble wetting the silver chloride salt to establish electrical contact and provide the internal filling solution of the reference half cell.
In @cite_13 SSCA2 was porting to an innovative many-core platform, which split cores for memory operations and graph analysis.