Introduction to the Cell-Processor

The Cell™ Processor has a new processor structure which combines even 9 cores in it. 8 of them - the so called Synergistic Processing Elements™  (SPEs) - are optimized for vectrorized floating point operations.

This enormous computing power is not only used in supercomputers like the IBM Roadrunner™, currently leading the list of the 500 most powerful known computer systems in the world (May 2009). A lighter version , where still 6 of the 8 SPEs are available, is embeded in Sony's PlayStation 3™, too.

So the PS 3™ constitutes a good access to the high-performance computing, because the obtained expierences and algorithms can be if neccessary easily transfered to the even faster products of the processor family like acceleration boards and blades.

JENTECH engineering supports you making this power accessible for your scientific purposes or for complex tasks of the image processing.

Applications

Since Version 3.2 the FFTW of the M.I.T, a library for fast fourier transformation, supports the Cell™-processor. 

Exemplarily we implemented the following algorithms:

• Filtering in frequency space
  
  
• Deconvolution of images
  
  • Removal of imaging errors like blurring and camera shaking.
  • inclusive adaptive noise suppression
    
    
• Correlation determination of images using FFT
  
  
• Least square method (LSM) to determine the best correlation between shifted images
  
  
• Radontransformation
  • In computed tomography applied reconstruction of 2D sections  out of 1D projections.

The times of the PS 3™ are comparable with the one of modern multi-core computers and even exceed them.

 Legal notices:
"Cell", "IBM Roadrunner", "PlayStation 3", "PS 3" are property of the corresponding companies IBM, Toshiba and Sony. The photo of the Cell DD2 die (chip) is taken from the press page of IBM. FFTW is a Fouriertransformation library programmed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.