Half a day tutorial @ MICRO-41

Performance tools for understanding the behavior of running programs on the Cell B.E


Lake Como, Italy
November 8, 2008 afternoon
 http://sysrun.haifa.il.ibm.com/hrl/micro-41-2008/

How can Cell performance tools help you squeeze more out of your Cell BE?


Abstract

The recent transition to multi-core architectures in the mainstream market segments creates significant challenges for programming systems. The market need for creating portable multithreaded applications that exploit high performance of chip multiprocessors is not easy to achieve. The Cell BE architecture is an heterogeneous multi-threaded that consists on a Power Processor Element (PPE) and 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE). In order to gain the best performance out of this innovative architecture, the running application needs to fully utilize the underlying architecture and understand the performance bottlenecks. In this tutorial we intend to introduce the set of advanced performance tools available for the Cell BE. These tools are aimed at helping understanding and improving the performance of the applications running on the Cell BE. The tutorial will start by talking on the new challenges that heterogeneous multicore architectures introduce followed by introduction and demonstrations of the performance tools for the Cell BE. This Tutorial will enable the participants get familiar with these advanced tools for better improved their code.

List of Topics

  1. Introduction to programming multicore challenge with focus on the Cell BE
  2. Overview of the available performance tools available as part of the SDK 3.0
  3. Deep dive into the tools:
  4. Future directions and challenges

The tutorial's foils as presented by Gadi Haber.

Cell BE Software


Porting and Tuning Programs for Cell BE:


Organizer and Presenters


Bibliography

  1. Cell SDK 3.1

  2. Cell/B.E. SDK 3.0 tools, Part 1: Using performance tools

  3. VPA site

  4. "Trace-based performance analysis on Cell BE", Marina Biberstein, Moon Chang, Bilha Mendelson, Uzi Shvadron and Javier Turek,
    2008 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, April 20-22, 2008

  5. "Clock Synchronization in Cell BE Traces",
    Marina Biberstein, Yuval Harel, and Andre Heilper, to be presented in EuroPAR, August 2008

  6. "Post-Link Code Restructuring Optimizations for the Cell SPE",
    Daniel Citron and Yaakov Yaari, 2008 Workshop on Cell Systems and Applications (in conjunction with the 2008 ISCA conf.), June 21-22, 2008