[vtkusers] Performing vector calculations on an IBM Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) Processor

[Elvis Dowson]

Hi,
         Has anyone tried to port and use VTK to the IBM Cell  
Broadband Engine (CBE) processor? The CBE has a 64-bit PPU (a power PC  
core) and 8 SPUs (vector processors). If most of VTK's vector  
calculations can be ported onto the CBE processor, one could obtain  
order of magnitude speed up in computational processing.

If you have a Playstation 3, running linux (Fedora Core 7 or Yellow  
Dog Linux) you already have the hardware to conduct some live  
experiments. The CBE SDK is also free. With a playstation, one can  
only use the CBE as a computational processor, for off-loading  
portions of the VTK pipeline for vector processing. The rendered  
results will have to be passed to an OpenGL rendering context, on a  
separate machine, since on the PS3 Linux implementation, one does not  
have access to the GPU.

If you use a IBM Cell Blade, this limitation will not apply, but the  
Cell blade is quite expensive and a PS3 should suffice for some  
initial ports and tests.

Best regards,

Elvis Dowson