Dr. Dobb’s – Programming the Cell Processor

Three developers affiliated with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory provide an in depth look for Dr. Dobb’s Journal at the options for optimizing a breadth first search (written in C) on the Cell Processor.

For the non-technical the results can be summarized as "On a Pentium 4 HT running at 3.4 GHz, this algorithm is able to check 24-million edges per second. On the Cell, at the end of our optimization, we achieved a performance of 538-million edges per second. This is an impressive result, but came at the price of an explosion in code complexity. While the algorithm in Listing One fits in 60 lines of source code, our final algorithm on the Cell measures 1200 lines of code"

Definitely one for the programmers amongst us.