Introduction to Parallel Programming on the Cell Broadband Engine

Lecturers

• Markus Stürmer
• Daniel Ritter

Time and Date

The course will be given as a three day block course on October 12th, 13th and 14th from 10.00 am - 6.00 pm each.

Place

This course will be given at the TU Munich Campus at Garching in the seminar room of Informatics V.

Room Number: 02.07.023

Contents and Organization

This course aims at BGCE students that are used to C programming and are interested in developing parallel applications. The Cell Broadband engine is IBM's interpretation of a modern, heterogenous multi core architecture. Its high floating-point performance and memory bandwidth make it attractive for scientific computing algorithms as well as for many other applications. This course offers an introduction to developing codes on this processor. The course will consist of a lecture part where basics of the Cell processor and the development environment are explained, however, the focus is clearly on practical exercises: The students will program the CBE in one or several projects groups (depending on the number of participants). These groups shall each implement a small application on the Playstation 3. At the end of the course each group will present their results.

A look at a similar previous course PlayProg SS2009 (German only) could be of interest for participants.

Interested students should have a look at the Cell Programming tutorial which can be found here. )

Prerequisites and Certificates

• The course is primarily open for BGCE students.
• Programming knowledge in C will be very helpful.
• 2.5 ECTS will be awarded for successful participation.