A cellular architecture is a type of computer architecture prominent in

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

. Cellular architectures are relatively new, with IBM's

Cell microprocessor Cell is a multi-core microprocessor microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose PowerPC core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as m ...

being the first one 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—concurrent ...

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 by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on Novemb ...

. 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 sever ...

, 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—commands or functions in the language map that are structurally similar to processor's instructions ...

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.

External links

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 {{CPU_technologies Parallel computing Computer architecture Classes of computers