Cell Devel Nodes
| Cell Development Cluster | |
|---|---|
| Installed | June 2010 |
| Operating System | Linux |
| Interconnect | Infiniband |
| Ram/Node | 32 Gb |
| Cores/Node | 2 PPU + 16 SPU |
| Login/Devel Node | cell-srv01 (from login.scinet) |
| Vendor Compilers | ppu-gcc, spu-gcc |
The Cell Development Cluster is a technology evaluation cluster with a combination of 14 IBM PowerXCell 8i "Cell" nodes and 8 Intel x86_64 "Nehalem" nodes. The QS22's each have two 3.2GHz "IBM PowerXCell 8i CPU's, where each CPU has 1 Power Processing Unit (PPU) and 8 Synergistic Processing Units (SPU), and 32GB of RAM per node. The Intel nodes have two 2.53GHz 4core Xeon X5550 CPU's with 48GB of RAM per node.
Login
First login via ssh with your scinet account at login.scinet.utoronto.ca, and from there you can proceed to cell-srv01 which is currently the gateway machine.
Compile/Devel/Compute Nodes
Currently you can log into any of 12 nodes blade03..blade14 directly to compile/test/run your code.
Local Disk
This test cluster currently cannot see the global /home and /scratch space so you will have to copy (scp,etc..) your code to a separate local /home dedicated for this cluster.
Programming Frameworks
Currently there are two programming frameworks to use. The Cell SDK is the most full featured and "supported" but is architecture specific, whereas the OpenCL is from IBM alphaworks but does allow code portability.
OpenCL
Examples for now are in
~northrup/OpenCL
Cell SDK
Demos, examples, and build details available in
/opt/cell/sdk/
Compilers
- ppu-gcc -- GNU GCC PowerPC compiler
- spu-gcc -- GNU GCC SPU compiler
- xlcl -- IBM XL OpenCL compiler
Documentation
- Cell SDK
- Cell OpenCL
Further Info
Cell Broadband engine tutorials http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/ieduasst/stgv1r0/index.jsp