  The Cell Broad Engine (BE) Processor has unique memory access architecture
besides its powerful computing engines. Many computing-intensive applications
have been ported to Cell/BE successfully. But memory-intensive applications are
rarely investigated except for several micro benchmarks. Since Cell/BE has
powerful software visible DMA engine, this paper studies on whether Cell/BE is
suit for applica- tions with large amount of random memory accesses. Two
benchmarks, GUPS and SSCA#2, are used. The latter is a rather complex one that
in representative of real world graph analysis applications. We find both
benchmarks have good performance on Cell/BE based IBM QS20/22. Com- pared with
2 conventional multi-processor systems with the same core/thread number, GUPS
is about 40-80% fast and SSCA#2 about 17-30% fast. The dynamic load balanc- ing
and software pipeline for optimizing SSCA#2 are intro- duced. Based on the
experiment, the potential of Cell/BE for random access is analyzed in detail as
well as its limita- tions of memory controller, atomic engine and TLB manage-
ment.Our research shows although more programming effort are needed, Cell/BE
has the potencial for irregular memory access applications.
