March 12, 2007

Introduction to PS3 Cell BE Programming

Narate Taerat

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

March 12, 2007

Cell BE Architecture

Picture ref: http://gamasutra.com/features/20060721/chow_01.shtml

March 12, 2007

Cell BE Architecture in PS3

PPEs

SPEs

March 12, 2007

PPEs

• PowerPC Processor Element• Main Processor• 64 bit• Also support Vector/SIMD• Run the OS, Manage SPE

March 12, 2007

SPEs

• Synergistic Processor Element• 128-bit RISC, SIMD (vector) processor• 256 KB local storage memory• Use DMA to transfer data between local storage

and main memory

March 12, 2007

Yellow Dog Linux

Easiest Linux installation on PS 3

Support to only Cell BE SDK 2.0

March 12, 2007

Fedora Core 6

• Support Cell BE SDK 2.1

• More difficult to install• See instruction at

– www.ps3coderz.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=73

March 12, 2007

Cell Programming

• Main Process run on PPE• Threads run on SPEs• PPE Centric programming paradigm

PPE process

SPE thread

SPE thread

SPE thread

...

March 12, 2007

PPE programming basic

• To create a SPE thread• speid_t spe_create_thread (

spe_gid_t gid, spe_program_handle_t *spe_program_handle, void

*argp, void *envp,

unsigned long *mask, int flags) • To wait a thread to complete• void speid_wait (

speid_t id, int *status, int option)

March 12, 2007

SPE Programming basic

• To put data to and get data from PPE• mfc_get(ls, ea, size, tag, tid, rid) • mfc_put(ls, ea, size, tag, tid, rid)

void* ls: Local Storagevoid* ea: Effective Address (of PPE)size_t size: size, in byte, of transfer memoryint tag: DMA tag (0-31)int tid, rid: ???

March 12, 2007

Compiling + Linking

• First compile SPE– spu-gcc spe_src.c -o spe_bin

• Embed it to a specific variable– embedspu spe_handle_var spu_bin embeded_spe.o

• Compile PPE and link to SPE– gcc ppe_src.c embeded_spe.o -lspu -o ppe_bin

March 12, 2007

Reference & Sources

• CBE Programming Tutorialhttp://www-306.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/FC857AE550F7EB83872571A80061F788

• Cell SDK & Linux installation tutorialwww.ps3coderz.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=73

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-linuxps3-1/

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-linuxps3-2/

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-linuxps3-3/

• Resources– http://hpci.latech.edu

March 12, 2007

Demo