bar234 / cellstream

View http://www.cs.vt.edu/~bar234/cellstream for a technical report on CellStream.

To run CellStream, compile a binary and run it as follows:
  diskio <# spes> <dma block size>
  
  e.g. diskio 4 4096
  
CellStream is an application for the Cell Broadband Engine that moves data from 
an external storage quickly and efficiently between SPEs and memory and back out 
to a storage device. It also supports a drop in kernel on the SPEs so some work 
can be done on the data as it is streamed through the SPEs.

It has been used as a test application comparing various programming models on 
multi-core processors with explicitly managed memory hierarchies (such as the 
Cell BE). In that paper, it was designed to compare how efficient each programming 
model was at streaming data to the SPEs. Since the handwritten version of 
CellStream is able to perform at close to peak speeds, it was a good indicator 
of the overhead introduced with the different programming models.