CIS Master's Defense: Siddhartha Bhalodia

Date(s): 11/5/2009 3:00 PM - 11/5/20093:30 PM
Location: Dion 303 Lab
Contact: Ram Bala r.bala@umassd.edu 508-999-8259


"Performance comparison of Cell Processor to Traditional Dual or Quad-Core Processor for Scientific Computing"

Abstract:
"Cell is a microprocessor architecture developed by STI, an alliance by SONY, Toshiba and IBM. The project mainly deals with comparison of Cell Processor and its architecture, against the traditional multi-core microprocessor technology for scientific computing.

A scientific code, numerically modeling the astrophysical process of a small star being captured by a black hole is used for data collection. In essence, it is a linear hyperbolic PDE (partial differential equation) solver in 2+1 dimensions. The code uses a Lax-Wendroff numerical scheme to evolve the given initial data and thus obtain a solution to the PDE. The PDE is inhomogeneous, i.e. it has a source-term that is mathematically very complex. This source-term calculation, which occurs twice at every time-step, is the most computationally intensive part of this code and would benefit tremendously from vectorization/parallelization. The goal of the project is to use the Cell's SPEs to parallelize this part of the computation and test performance gain compared to a traditional multi core architecture.

Various other bench marks were also carried out to validate the cell processor's performance over the traditional multi-core architecture."