The Octoplier: A New Software Device Affecting Hardware Group 4 Austin Beam Brittany Dearien Brittany Dearien Warren Irwin Amanda Medlin Amanda Medlin Rob Westerman Rob Westerman

The Basis of a Cell Chip  Every cell chip contains a Power Process Element know as a Power PC970 processing core.  This core is able to run Linux and other forms of readily available software.

 These consists of 8 Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE’s) which run certain programs  The difficulty here is each has a separate connection to memory.

How do we deal with this?  The Octoplier: a software development tool that will convert a single human written program into several different programs that run simultaneously on cells virtuous cores.  This allows programs to be divided into parts by the compiler through software, regulating the SPE’s

What will this do?  It is designed to:  Increase Competitive Advantage  Reduce hardware complexity   Produce faster clock cycles  Increase predictability  Eliminate demand for independent engineering

How it works…  Can run at speeds of up to 4GHz as well as run 9 processing cores (exceeding the previous 8)  Removes the manual aspect of programming out of the picture

 Develops better instructions in a high level language for the SPE’s as opposed to the Power PC Core  Designates each tasks through a language designed in the chip.  Parallelization allows users to develop applications with a single shared memory source

Where have I seen this?  Technology originally known as the Cell Broadband Engine  Sony’s Playstation 3 Games  Toshiba High Definition Television  Because videogames can also be good for technical computing, IBM and Mercury are developing Cell based systems including  3D Imaging  Radar Signal Processing

Goals of  Enhance programmability while continuing to provide high performance  Creating new software of writing code and distributing the programs as hardware  Create a wider use of Cell based servers

Octopliers in the Future  Could be seen in everyday technology such as  Registers  Cameras  Cell Phones  Soon to be released Playstation 3