LinuxConf Europe 2007

Photos and reports

Timetable

Programme

Registration

LPI Exams

Conference Dinner (Sunday)

Duxford Excursion (Monday)

Exhibitors and Sponsors

Accommodation

Venue

Travel

About Cambridge

Kernel Summit 2007

Other GUUG events

Other UKUUG events

Kinuko Yasuda - Fixstars Corporation

TUTORIAL 3 HALF-DAY: Introduction to Cell Programming on Linux

The Cell, PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3)'s CPU, is a powerful multi-core processor with one general-purpose PowerPC processor and eight special-purpose SIMD cores. Linux runs on Cell processors, therefore PS3 (or other Cell machine) users can already write programs which exploit Cell's massive power.

This tutorial covers the basics of Cell programming for Linux users, including Cell architecture overview, multi-core programming and SIMD programming. It is intended for those who are familiar with C and/or C++ programming on Unix but who have never written programs for Cell.

The tutorial will be a half-day tutorial, consisting of two 90-min sessions.

The first session will focus on Cell's (unique but powerful) hardware architecture, its programming model and programming environment. The Libspe2, one of the most important open-source library for Cell programming on Linux will also be explained.

The second session will focus on programming for SPE (Synergistic Processor Element), Cell's special-purpose SIMD core optimized for multi-media processing. This session introduces SIMD (Single Instruction / Multiple Data) programming for SPE and also brief some typical optimization techniques for Cell and SPE.