- Cellular architecture
A cellular architecture is a type of
computer architecture prominent inparallel computing . Cellular architectures are relatively new, withIBM 'sCell microprocessor being the first one to reach the market. Cellular architecture takes multi-core architecture design to its logical conclusion, by giving the programmer the ability to run large numbers of concurrent threads within a single processor. Each 'cell' is a compute node containing thread units, memory, and communication. Speed-up is achieved by exploitingthread-level parallelism inherent in many applications.Cell, a cellular architecture containing 9 cores, is the processor used in the
Playstation 3 . Another prominent cellular architecture isCyclops64 , a massively parallel architecture currently under development by IBM.Cellular architectures follow the
concrete programming paradigm, which exposes the programmer to much of the underlying hardware. This allows the programmer to greatly optimize his code for the platform, but at the same time makes it very difficult to develop software.External links
* [http://www.research.ibm.com/thinkresearch/pages/2001/20010611_cellular.shtml Cellular architecture builds next generation supercomputers]
* [http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v35_1_02/blue_gene.shtml ORNL, IBM, and the Blue Gene Project]
* [http://www.gcn.com/20_28/tech-report/17088-1.html Energy, IBM are partners in biological supercomputing project]
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