Cellular architecture is a type of computer architecture prominent in

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computing, computation in which many calculations or Process (computing), processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. ...

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Cell microprocessor The Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) is a 64-bit multi-core processor and microarchitecture developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM—an alliance known as "STI". It combines a general-purpose PowerPC core, called the Power Processing Element (PPE), ...

was the first cellular architecture 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 exploiting

thread-level parallelism Task parallelism (also known as function parallelism and control parallelism) is a form of parallelization of computer code across multiple processors in parallel computing environments. Task parallelism focuses on distributing tasks—concurren ...

inherent in many applications. Cell, a cellular architecture containing 9 cores, is the processor used in the

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE). It is the successor to the PlayStation 2, and both are part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. The PS3 was first released on ...

. Another prominent cellular architecture is

Cyclops64 Cyclops64 (formerly known as Blue Gene/C) is a cellular architecture in development by IBM. The Cyclops64 project aims to create the first "supercomputer on a chip". History Cyclops64 is part of the Blue Gene effort, to produce the next several ...

, a massively parallel architecture currently under development by IBM. Cellular architectures follow the

low-level programming A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture, memory or underlying physical hardware; commands or functions in the language are structurally simil ...

paradigm, which exposes the programmer to much of the underlying hardware. This allows the programmer to greatly optimize their code for the platform, but at the same time makes it more difficult to develop software.

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Cellular architecture builds next generation supercomputers

ORNL, IBM, and the Blue Gene Project

* ttps://github.com/wso2/reference-architecture/blob/master/reference-architecture-cell-based.md Cell-based Architecture Parallel computing Computer architecture Classes of computers {{compu-hardware-stub

See also

References

External links