I'm only at the LSST for another month, and Tim, my boss, has suggested that I use the remainder of my time not on our prototype code but on playing with the Cell architecture.
My response to this has been broken into several stages:
1) Joyful excitement. Goodbye, UML! Goodbye, boring software engineering assignments! Hello to the exploring the hot-topic design of the new millenium!
2) Confusion! The media was not meant for computer science. Google "Cell architecture" and you'll hear nonsense that will blow your mind - "its the desktop on a chip!" "It's a global grid infrastructure!" "It's SkyNet!" and of course, the obvious backlash - "It's just a G4!" "It's a bunch of hype!" "It's Sony's downfall and IBM's Itanic!" Suddenly, finding realistic information not provided by IBM is impossible, and it's nearly as hard not to love or hate this thing before even understanding it.
3) Puzzled looks at the IBM website. Corporate websites are bad enough, but you'd think IBM would get the picture. There's a simulator, once you create an IBM ID; and, oh, wait, the simulator is part of the SDK? And half the necessary files are on the Barcelona Supercomputing Center website? And installing Fedora (Core 5 only!) is *required* to get it to run?
4) Frustration. The install script never works correctly. The Barcelona page is completely spazzy. Leave the download script running overnight and hope that it will finish before coming back to work. Arrrrghhhh.
5) Renewed excitement. You have to write separate programs for the separate components of the CPU? You have to be running the *simulated* version just to get any kind of terminal I/O (i.e. printf) from the 8 SPUs on the chip that do most of the computation? Is this a trip to the future or into the assembly programming days? Can this really ever fly? Will the install script ever work?
arch detail
No comments:
Post a Comment