A heterogeneous data parallel computational model for cell broadband engine

Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) is a state-of-the-art heterogeneous multi-core processor. It is an accelerator-based multi-core architecture, which contains a powerful 64-bit dual-threaded PowerPC core and eight high efficient single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD) cores. Apart from traditional parallel systems, the users must explicitly manage the communication, scheduling and load-balancing to achieve Cell's greatest performance. In this paper, a novel heterogeneous data parallel computational model on Cell BE is proposed. This aggressive model could not only exploit computing power of SPE but also that of PPE and aggregate them together to achieve high performance. We investigate the performance of this model with naive ray tracing algorithm. The preliminary experimental results validate the efficiency of this model.