[Vitaly Vidmirov]

In this topic i'll try to collect all interesting CELL-related resources available on the net.
If you found something not covered by these resources, please, let me know (PM).


Information, specs and tutorials

IBM Cell resource center - CELL SDK, documentation and tutorials
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/

CELL tech library - CELL B.E. architecture specs and other documents
http://www-01.ibm.com/chips/techlib/...oadband_Engine

CellPerformance - the site this forum belongs to =)
http://cellperformance.com

PS3Coders - CELL related news and lot of tutorials
http://ps3coderz.com

Insomniac Games R&D:
http://insomniacgames.com/tech/techpage.php

SCEA R&D:
http://www.research.scea.com

CELL B.E. programming wiki - howtos, code snippets, and other material useful to make your life easier
http://cellbe.editthis.info/wiki/Cel...ogramming_wiki

PS2DEV - PS3 forums on the great PS2 homebrew site
http://ps2dev.org

IBM on gameindustry
http://gametomorrow.com/blog

Cell Broadband Engine Open Source Development Mailing List:
http://ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/


Papers & Articles

Redbook : Programming the Cell Broadband Engine Examples and Best Practices
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpiece.../sg247575.html

Cell Broadband Engine Technology and Systems - IBM Journal of R&D v.51 5/2007
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd51-5.html

Georgia Tech STI Cell/B.E. Workshop 2007
http://sti.cc.gatech.edu/index.html

Summit on Software and Algorithms for the Cell Processor
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~dongarra/cell2006/

MIT lectures: Multicore Programming Primer
http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ps3/lectures.shtml

Benefits of Register-Level Lookup for a CELL SPU Math Library
http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~anand/papers/SPUSPMath.pdf
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~dongarra/cell...pher-Anand.pdf

Utilizing PS3 GPU memory as RAMDISK in Linux
http://forums.ps2dev.org/viewtopic.php?t=8267

Simulation of Mobile Adhoc Node over Cell Broadband Engine Architecture
http://www.ssnsase.ac.in/hipaac2007/.../ALG%20660.pdf

Raytracing on CELL

Test iRT on your PS3
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/irt

http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.p...5/cell-vs-g80/
http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.p...r-at-gdc-2007/
http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.p...r-irt-at-sc06/

Tech
http://www.gametomorrow.com/minor/barry/iRT-Sumary.pdf
http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~benthin/cellrt06.pdf
http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/635/lohr1.pdf
http://eric_rollins.home.mindspring.com/ray/ray.html

Interactive raytracing on 3 x PS3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8


HPC

Mercury - CELL hardware and software manufacturer
www.mc.com

Rapidmind - generalized solution for multicore chips programming
http://rapidmind.net

CELL-specific example of the code for Rapidmind framework
http://www.rapidmind.net/pdfs/RapidMindCellPorting.pdf

HPC Cell+
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~samw/projects/cell/CF06.pdf

Exploiting Single Precision Arithmetic and Achieving Full Precision Accuracy
http://icl.cs.utk.edu/iter-ref/

Optimization of Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication on Emerging Multicore Platforms
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~samw/res...apers/sc07.pdf

Roadrunner project - IBM CELL-based supercomputer
http://www.lanl.gov/roadrunner/

Exploring the Viability of the Cell Broadband Engine for Bioinformatics Applications
http://www.hicomb.org/papers/HICOMB2007-07.pdf

Libraries
CTK is an open-source C/C++ toolkit library for the Cell/B.E. processor - CTK provides a set of common APIs for libspe, libspe2 and libspere
http://ctk-dev.sourceforge.net/

Matrix multiply code reaching nearly peak performance of CELL
http://tu-dresden.de/die_tu_dresden/...rechnern/cell/

OpenCV - open source computer vision library
http://cell.fixstars.com/opencv/inde...CV_on_the_Cell


Personal

Ranulf Doswell's ps3 development site - home of python-ps3 project and some little demos
http://ranulf.net/ps3

Vitaly Vidmirov's little blog about CELL and nothing more
http://cellrb.blogspot.com

Ozzy's blog
http://www.renderstate.de


Power6
Not very CELL related, but interesting anyway

Power6 technology overview
http://www.nevicare.nl/aix/uif077.pdf

POWER6 Microprocessor Technology - IBM Journal of R&D v.51 6/2007
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd51-6.html

Detailed Power6 binary FPU overview
http://www.lirmm.fr/arith18/papers/d...gs-1-p6bfu.pdf

A 5GHz+ 128-bit Binary Floating-Point Adder for the POWER6 Processor
http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/~yanzi/esscirc06_submit.pdf

Optimization

Memory performance

What every programmer should know about memory, Part1:
http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/
Memory part 2: CPU caches
http://lwn.net/Articles/252125/
Memory part 3: Virtual Memory
http://lwn.net/Articles/253361/
Memory part 4: NUMA support
http://lwn.net/Articles/254445/
Memory part 5: What programmers can do
http://lwn.net/Articles/255364/



thanks OzzyBC42, patsu

[OzzyBC42]

Insomniac Games R&D:

http://insomniacgames.com/tech/techpage.php

SCEA R&D:

http://www.research.scea.com

Personal:

http://www.renderstate.de



P.S.: Someone should sticky this thread

[patsu]

Cell Broadband Engine Open Source Development Mailing List:
http://ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/

[patsu]

"OpenCV on the Cell"
http://cell.fixstars.com/opencv/inde...CV_on_the_Cell

OpenCV is an open source computer vision library developed by Intel. It consists of functions like below:
Object Identification
Segmentation and Recognition
Face Recognition
Gesture Recognition
Motion Tracking
Ego Motion
Motion Understanding
Structure From Motion (SFM)
Highlevel GUI

Paper I have not seen before:
"Simulation of Mobile Adhoc Node over Cell Broadband Engine Architecture"
http://www.ssnsase.ac.in/hipaac2007/.../ALG%20660.pdf

Mobile Ad-hoc networking (MANET) is a
technique to communicate with each other from a
temporary network, without any form of centralized
administrations. Each node participating in the network
acts both as host and a router and must therefore forward
packets for others nodes. Some sort of support from the
architecture level is necessary for high performance for
this multitudinous node. So, the ADHOC implementation
with CELL processor has been performed in this work.

EDIT:
iSCSI/HD storage engine for PS3:
http://linux-iscsi.org/index.php/Playstation3/iSCSI

[Arwin]

Very cool:

http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ps3/index.shtml

This course is a brand new IAP 2007 class offering open to all MIT students (undergraduates and graduates). Students will spend several weeks learning about new multicore architectures and parallel programming patterns, and will design and implement projects to run directly on the new PLAYSTATION®3 consoles. The course will culminate in an exciting competition at the end of IAP, and prizes will be awarded to the best projects. The course will give students hands on experience in parallel programming in an exciting and relevant context.

There's all sorts of stuff open to the public, and also note an interesting appearance of a famous face in session 16

[Vitaly Vidmirov]

Originally Posted by Arwin

http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ps3/index.shtml

This one is already in the list

[patsu]

Found a 2-part cell programming tutorial on codeproject.com:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/librar...roramming.aspx

It's a puzzle solving sample.

[patsu]

OpenCV has a demo app (released in August but I missed it):

Slide show face detection:


Video (real-time) detection:

[patsu]

IBM keeps a list of open source Cell projects here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/po...en_source.html

Some may be defunct already.

[patsu]

Originally Posted by patsu

OpenCV has a demo app (released in August but I missed it):

Slide show face detection:


Video (real-time) detection:

Just found out that PS3 OpenCV is compatible with Playstation Eye even though it's not listed in their supported webcams page here: http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/

No additional patch is needed.

[Shifty Geezer]

102 ms using the entire processing power available?! Kinda unusable, and sounds slower than lots of other implementations. Mobile phones and cameras don't have 100 watt processors to manage this!

[patsu]

I was at Best Buy yesterday and saw the "Smile Shuttle" cameras Sony's selling. They are certainly extremely quick in recognizing our smiles (almost instant).

Not sure about the differences between the above implementation and the camera ones though. The FixStar/OpenCV implementation seems to be based on Haar Classifier: http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/FaceDetection

EDIT: I'm actually more interested in tracking human form as well as animals (stray cats, deers in my friends' and my backyards).

[Betanumerical]

Just saw this whilst browsing sourceforge, didn't think it deserved its own thread but if it does feel free to make one.

http://www.ccs3.lanl.gov/~pakin/software/cellmessaging/

The Cell Messaging Layer (CML) is a communication library for the Cell Broadband Engine, which many people recognize as the Playstation 3's microprocessor. CML implements a small but useable subset of the functions provided by the Messaging Passing Interface (MPI), which provides a familiar interface to programmers who are accustomed to programming parallel computers or workstation clusters.

Looks pretty cool

[patsu]

Interesting... looks like a subset of MPI-2 specs.
(http://www.open-mpi.org/video/downlo...pen%5D-mpi.mov)

Would be nice if we can get hold of OpenCL for Cell too.

[patsu]

SDL added prelim Cell support: http://www.libsdl.org/cgi/viewvc.cgi...&revision=4476

This patch provides basic support for video on the Sony PS3
Linux framebuffer. Scaling, format-conversion, and drawing is
done from the SPEs, so there is little performance impact to
PPE applications. This is by no means production quality code,
but it is a very good start and a good example of how to use the
PS3's hardware capabilities to accelerate video playback on
the box.

The driver has been verified to work with ffplay, mplayer and xine.
This piece of software has been developed at the IBM R&D Lab
in Boeblingen, Germany and is now returned to the community.

[patsu]

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/s...66&newsLang=en

The CE-10 encoding software is designed to be installed on a PC and allows users the ability to access the power of the PS3® platform as an accelerator to enhance video encoding with the H.264 compliant CodecSys process to achieve professional encoding quality for the prosumer market sector.

Additional features of the CE-10 include:

* High quality low bit rate compression
* Ultra fast HD encoding
* Flexible software-based advantages
* Professional quality at an affordable “prosumer” price

“We really feel that in the CE-10 we’ve created a game changing application because of its ability to provide professional quality encoding at a consumer level,” said Satoshi Miki, Chief Executive Officer of Fixstars. “We’re confident that videographers at any level will benefit from its flexibility, speed and quality and eagerly await the response and reactions of the first evaluations from NAB.”

“We congratulate Fixstars on its ability to incorporate CodecSys and our H.264 encoder to create a professional grade encoder for consumers,” said Rod Tiede, president and CEO of Broadcast International. “The speed at which they worked to create the CE-10 was truly amazing and we are excited to partner with Fixstars and look forward to the opportunity to join them in unveiling this groundbreaking technology at NAB.”

[Shifty Geezer]

I presume it uses the PS3 over Ethernet as a coprocessor board? If so, that's just a short step from offering many acceleration functions on PS3, including my dream of using it as a software synth.

Do we have any details on PS3's PC integration?

[betan]

While browsing their website, I've noticed Yellow Dog Enterprise can use RSX VRAM as fast mem swap. I always wanted that as it's the first step towards a "512 MB" PS3 linux, but have not been following PS3 distro news (as I'm fairly happy with my text/console/framebuffer setup).

Are other distributions doing VRAM swap as well?

[patsu]

Yes. The ps3vram driver is available for other PS3 distros as well, and has undergone a revision recently. The GUI is noticeably smoother with it.

[patsu]

Originally Posted by patsu

iSCSI/HD storage engine for PS3:
http://linux-iscsi.org/index.php/Playstation3/iSCSI

It's updated to v3.0. Someone from the cbe-oss-dev mailing list tried it:
http://ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-...il/006679.html

I have recently been updating my Playstation3s to use the
lio-core-2.6.git v3.0 codebase, and I am happy to report all of v3.0
functionality is now up and running with Target_Core_Mod/ConfigFS and
LIO-Target v3.0 on v2.6.29 ppc64 including SCSI-3 compliant emulation.
Persistent Reservations, full ConfigFS operation, and hardware device
export is up and running.

[patsu]

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical...ideo/index.htm

[Vitaly Vidmirov]

thanks patsu, I'll refresh the links one day =)