Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] PS3/Cell BE platform

[Jason]

Thomas Schmid wrote:
> On 11/15/06, Daniel O'Connor <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Thursday 16 November 2006 16:22, Robert McGwier wrote:
> > > The Nividia GPU's have fft and blas running on them.  They are doing
> > > teraflops and the tools/SDK are available under NDA.  They do indeed
> > > have multiply , accumulate,  etc.
> >
> > ATI/AMD have something similar..
> > http://ati.amd.com/companyinfo/researcher/resources.html
> >
> > (Not that I have used either)
>
> And somebody even did the implementation of the fft on a GPU for
> gnuradio already:
> www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/fir/fir.ps
>
> Looks kind of old, but very interesting...

If you get a copy of the CellSDK iso [1], extract the cell-sdk-1.1 rpm, 
all source in there (including 'src/lib/fft/*') is under the Common 
Public License 1.0, which is approved by OSI [2].  The fft code will do 
1d and 2d...

The only thing which concerns me is that none of the source files in the 
SDK refer to the license file, they simply say "All rights reserved". 
Which doesn't exactly give me a warm fuzzy.  However, the CPL-1.0 file 
is in the 'license/' directory just under the root of the SDK tree.  It 
should be reasonable to assume that all files in the SDK fall under that 
license, but ianal.

Legal nitpicks aside, the SPE will apparently take in an array of four 
single-precision floats (128bits total in one register), and multiply or 
add it to another array of four floats, all in one instruction.  This 
would massively reduce the number of instructions for, say, multiplying 
two 4x4 matrices together.  Then toss in the fact that there are 7 
SPE's, each moving at 3.2GHz, each with 256K of DMA accessible local 
memory.  Sorry, I'm drooling.  :)


Jason.

[1] http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/downloads.html
[2] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/cpl1.0.php