It is a great research interest to integrate the Cell/B.E. processor into an AMD Opteron system. The result is a system benefiting from the advantages of both processors: the high computational power of the Cell/B.E. and the high I/O throughput of the Opteron.
The task of this diploma thesis is to accomplish, that Cell-SPU code initially residing on the Opteron could be executed on the Cell under the GNU/Linux operating system. However, the SPUFS (Synergistic Processing Unit File System), provided from STI (Sony, Toshiba, IBM), does exactly the same thing on the Cell. The Cell is a combination of a PowerPC core and Synergistic Processing elements (SPE). The main work is to analyze the SPUFS and migrate it to the Opteron System.
The result of the migration is a project called RSPUFS (Remote Synergistic Processing Unit File System), which provides nearly the same interface as SPUFS on the Cell side. The differences are caused by the TCP/IP link between Opteron and Cell, where no Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is available. So it is not possible to write synchronously to the local store of the SPEs. The synchronization occurs implicitly before executing the Cell-SPU code. But not only semantics have changed: to access the XDR memory RSPUFS extends SPUFS with a special XDR interface, where the application can map the XDR into the local address space. The application must be aware of synchronization with an explicit call of the provided ''xdr\_sync'' routine. Another difference is, that RSPUFS does not support the gang principle of SPUFS, which is necessary to set the affinity between the SPEs.
This thesis deals not only with the operating system part, but also with a library called ''libspe''. Libspe provides a wrapper around the SPUFS system calls. It is essential to port this library to the Opteron, because most of the Cell applications use it. Libspe is not only a wrapper, it saves a lot of work for the developer as well, like loading the Cell-SPU code or managing the context and system calls initiated by the SPE. Thus it has to be ported, too.
The result of the work is, that an application can link against the modified libspe on the Opteron gaining direct access to the Synergistic Processor Elements.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:18932 |
| Date | 11 March 2008 |
| Creators | Heinig, Andreas |
| Contributors | Mehlan, Torsten, Rehm, Wolfgang, Technische Universität Chemnitz |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:masterThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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