The Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) processor developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM is employed in the Sony PlayStation 3 and other platforms and provides a powerful yet affordable parallel computing component for building dedicated compute clusters for scientific simulations. The device is essentially a networked compute node with up to six accesible Synergystic Processing Element (SPE) cores available for the applicatiosn programmer to accelerate computations. This article presents some programming algorithms and implementations of Monte Carlo simulations using the Cell BE running Linux on PlayStation 3 systems. Scalability and performance data is presented for use of multi-computers as well as multiple SPEs within one node. Some discussion is given on future efficient uses of the Cell BE and similar accelerator devices for scientific programming.
Keywords: Cell BE; STI; parallel computing; Monte Carlo algorithms; accelerator processing device.
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