Welcome to the Cell/PS3 Project at Heilbronn University
What is the aim of this project? To provide a framework for research and teaching primarilly in the area of multicore development and parallel programming. To give stundents the chance to get hands-on experience on an interesting hardware platform and set of Software Engineering problems.
What does this have to do with Sony's Playstation 3? The PS3 is powered by the Cell Broadband Engine, a novel multicore CPU developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. Because Sony allows the installation of Linux on the PS3 and because IBM offers a free Software Development Kit (SDK), the PS3 is the cheapest way to develop for the new chip.
What is so special about this chip? The short answer is: It is extremely fast and has a unique architecture. At peak performance, the chip reaches up to 200 GFlops. That is 200 billion floating point operations per second! It has a heterogenous multicore architecture that consists of a Power PC processor along with eight vector processors that are specialised for data crunching. An improved version of the cell chip is also the basis of Roadrunner - the fastest computer in the world.
Why are we at the Software Engineering department so interested in this chip? Because it is challenging to develop software for it - at least software that harnests its power - and because we would like to gain more experience with multicore-development and parallel programming.
Why do Software Engineers bother about parallel hardware? Because the time of free program speed-ups with each new chip generation is over. Instead of ever faster cores, modern CPUs achieve speed increases by providing more cores. Only software that can be executed in parallel benefits from such multicore architectures. Effectively using the available techniques, languages and plattforms to build parallel application is crucial, but still not well understood.
What can be found on this website? This website provides information about the project, its members, results and documentation. Anyone who is interested can find out about what we are doing and students from Heilbronn University can get ideas for projects. In addition to that, we hope that especially the documentation part is of interest to people outside our University as well.
Project contents
To get to know the cell we are currently working on a particle system and a realtime ray tracer. Further projects we have in mind include a compiler for the Forth programming language and a tool for generating 3D models from a series of 2D images.
News
Our project at HHN Tag der offenen Tuer 2009
Visit us in the foyer of Heilbronn University on 2009-11-07.
SDL with Yellow Dog
Programming applications with framebuffer, keyboard and mouse support on the PS3? - Simply use SDL! Our documentation explains how to install and use the popular multimedia API on Yellow Dog Linux. More…
Particle System for the PS3
Calculating tens of thousands of particles to create special effects is a task that fits well for a number cruncher such as the Cell. That is why we built our own Cell particle system. More…
Cell/PS3 Project at Azubi- und Studientage
We received positive feedback and lots of questions when we presented our project to prospective students at an exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany. More…
Cell/PS3 Project at Studieninfotag
We will present our project at the Studieninfotag , an information event for prospective students. Visit us in the foyer of Heilbronn University on 2008-11-19, 9:30 am to 3 pm.