Olaf Schenk, Department of Computer Science

One-Day IBM Cell Programming Tutorial

On Tuesday, September 4, 2007 we will host a one-day IBM Cell Programming Workshop run by Hema Reddy, Cell Solutions Engineer at IBM Cell Ecosystem & Solutions Enablement. The tutorial consists of a series of lectures and hands-on exercises in a Cell development environment to familiarize the students with Cell basic programming skills.

Download Cell Material

Hands-On Cell Examples , Tutorial Slides and Cell Demos .

Agenda:

Location and Agenda

The tutorial will take place in the IFW building of the ETH, located at the following address: Room A32.1 and Room D31, Building IFW, Haldeneggsteig 4 / Weinbergstrasse, 8092 Zürich. Building CAB is located close to the main ETH building. Here you have more information and links:

Agenda:

8:55 - 9:00	Welcome
9:00 - 9:30	ll BE Overview
9:30 - 10:30	Basic Cell programming concepts
10:30 - 10:45	Break
10:45 - 11:45	Development tools Cell-SDK-1.1, IDE, debugging, performance profiling, hands-on examples
11:45 - 12:30	Cell programming, SIMD aspects, hands-on SIMD examples
12:30 - 1:30	Lunch
1:30 - 2:15	Communicational aspects, DMA and mailbox, hands-on examples
2:15 - 3:00	Software model
3:00 - 3:15	Break
3:15 - 4:00	Parallel programming and application porting
4:00 - 5:00	Programming tips and techniques

About the Cell processor

The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) is a heterogeneous chip multiprocessor that consists of an IBM 64-bit Power Architecture core, augmented with eight specialized co-processors based on a novel single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architecture called Synergistic Processor Unit (SPU), which is for data-intensive processing, like that found in cryptography, media and scientific applications. The first major commercial application of Cell was in Sony's PlayStation 3 game console. For more information on Cell see http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/

H. Peter Hofstee, Real-time Supercomputing and Technology for Games and Entertainment, Keynote Talk, SC06, Tampa, FL, November 16, 2006.

A comprehensive Cell Broadband Engine resource center is located at http://www.ibm.com/developer/power/cell

Preregistration:

In order to attend the tutorial you must preregister . Another message with more details on the tutorial including final location and instructions on Cell VMware appliance set-up will be e-mailed to all the registered attendees several days before the tutorial.

Instructor:

Hema Reddy is an Advisory Engineer with IBM Corporation and is actively involved in her role to strengthen the Cell/B.E. Ecosystem and develop proof of concept code. Prior to this assignment, she was responsible for writing device drivers for Linux kernel customized for PowerPC, and developed firmware microcode for the Service Processor for IBM System i and System p eServers. Hema has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and a Masters Degree in Computer Science and Technology.

Technical Requirements:

This is a hands-on tutorial aimed at providing a jump start to Cell programming. In order to maximize the benefits of this opportunity you must set-up in advance a Cell development environment on your laptop computer. The Cell SDK2.1 image (distributed through the link below as a VMware Appliance) is used to provide a virtual machine which includes FC6, Cell SDK2.1, and Cell IDE. This virtual machine can be installed on either Linux or Windows platforms. The VMware player for both Linux and Windows versions is licensing-free and available from VMware web site.

VMWare Players:
Cell SDK2.1: (last updated: 2 May 2007)
Cell SDK2.0: (last updated: 28 January 2007)