Vector stream processing for effective application of heterogeneous parallelism

ABSTRACT

Heterogeneous multicore chipsets with many levels of parallelism are becoming increasingly common in high-performance computing systems. Effective use of parallelism in these new chipsets is paramount. We present a 3D chemical transport module optimized for the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA). By leveraging the heterogeneous parallelism of the Cell with a method we call vector stream processing, our transport module achieves performance comparable to two nodes of an IBM BlueGene/P, or eight Xeon cores, on a single Cell chip. Performance of the module on two CBEA systems, an IBM BlueGene/P, and an eight-core shared-memory Intel Xeon workstation are given.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.3 Concurrent Programming

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.2 Multiple Data Stream Architectures (Multiprocessors)

  J. Computer Applications
  J.2 PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING

General Terms:
Design, Performance

Keywords:
cell broadband engine, chemical transport modeling, dimension splitting, modeling, vector stream processing