This web log is the product of the collaborative, innovative, virtual minds of the editors of the IBM developerWorks Multicore acceleration (Cell/B.E. SDK) zone.

Faster than a speeding bullet: And still the champ ...

... at half the energy: Or, to paraphrase another cartoon, the cat tried but couldn't catch the bird. The IBM-constructed LANL Roadrunner (see disclaimer on name use) is still No. 1 on the Top500 Supercomputing Sites list, the ninth time in a row an IBM machine grabbed the top spot. At 1.105pflops, the LANL Roadrunner just beat out the Cray XT5 QC Jaguar (at 1.059pflops), the second plus-pflops machine. LANL Roadrunner also was roughly twice as energy-efficient as No. 2 (IBM took the energy effiency prize in the list -- the 20 top systems belonged to Big Blue).

Securing an energy future with performance
Grabbing the advantage through the ability to simulate: Besides cutting the cost of finding oil, the Repsol Kaleidoscope project is also hoping to demonstrate that the ability to rapidly develop and display complex simulations (like the company's doing with its Cell/B.E.-based system) can be the key to securing the world's energy future. Repsol just fired up its system to add some speed to advanced seismic imaging so the company can better visualize oil accumulations lying deep beneath the ocean floor.

Games people play: PS3 in the "terrific" twos

November 17 the birthday: According to Sony Insider, there are nearly 17 million PS3 systems around the world. That's an installed base!

Clear conference calendars: SC08 about fast networking

Going on right now: SC08 (November 15-21, Austin, Texas) is all about fast interconnects, including

• QLogic's quad-rate Infiniband switches based on a new ASIC with 36 ports running at up to 40Gbps.
• Alacritech's upgraded 10Gb Ethernet adapter card that can be used for partial offload of TCP/IP processing.

There's also a posting session by the LANL authors of "Entering the Petaflop Era: The Architecture and Performance of Roadrunner," plus scads of papers detailing programming and networking techniques to leverage a massively parallel, multicore system and that demonstrate practical uses of supercomputing power, from tire development to electron transport systems. It is a bonanza of knowledge!

It came from the Lab: Non-genetic use for DNA

Turning DNA strands into fiber optical cables: ChalmersUofTech researchers want to praise their new technique because it allows them to easily convert strands of DNA into very small fibre optic cables. The key is assembling chromophores (molecules that absorb and pass light) in a chain. The group used a YO chromophore that has a strong affinity for DNA molecules -- it hungrily jams itself in between the basepair rungs of DNA strands. Just like that, you've got a 20nm long/1-2nm wide optical wire, the perfect size for microchip interconnects. They placed a molecule that would accept light on one end and one that would emit light at the other.

A downside is that in early testing, it shows the strands naturally transmit about 30 percent of the light received; also, since they are naturally replicating, precise positioning along the strand can't be acertained so variations could exist. On the extraplus side, though, if one chromophore gets damaged, another will naturally take its place so they are self-healing. Some uses: Artificial photosynthesis to replace solar panels, optical computers.

All the antimatter you can eat
Cooking with lasers: Lawrence Livermore researchers have a recipe for antimatter -- shoot an intense laser through a pinhead-size gold bit and whooosh! 100 billion particles of antimatter (positrons). The laser drives accelerated ions (loose electrons) through the gold where they interact with the gold nuclei. The interaction makes the electrons emit pure energy packets which decay into matter and antimatter. It's the concentration of energy and mass that produces the copious amounts of antiparticles -- researchers have done this trick before but they'd only tried it with thin sheets of gold and less-intense lasers.

Conventional wisdom alert: Evolution just happens, man

Guess what? Evolution evolves: Princeton scientists looking at a group of proteins that help cells burn energy found something else -- evidence that evolutionary changes don't take place gradually and randomly under pressure from natural selection. In other words, the changes evolution engenders may be more directed than scientists originally thought -- but unlike "intelligent design," the "intelligence" comes from within the organism itself. (Intelligent design believers can stop reading now ... the group says this is not evidence of an exterior intelligence driving evolution; also, it is not evidence that the DNA itself is "thinking.")

What they are proposing is that evolution isn't as random as originally thought. They discovered that their electron transport chain proteins were self-correcting imbalance imposed on them via artifical mutation. A math analysis showed that these proteins were making tiny corrections all the time, pushing the organism to a more fit state.

Are semi makers really software companies?
Opinion: Software is the elephant in the room: Michel Genard thinks that if semiconductor manufacturers reinvented themselves as software-centric companies, they would be able to solve many of their biggest operational problems and to add the differentiating qualities to their individual organizations they will need to stand out in the future of the semi business. Genard says that if you examine semi industry constraints, you'll see that software glitches are the basis of most problems like product delays and budget overruns. Virtual software development could give a semi company a jump on the competition by allowing them to find and eliminate problems before they happen by working with their RTOS partners, long before the silicon is ready. (One product produced this way was the new Freescale QorIQ P4080 multicore processor.)

Oddments: Zapping refuse

Heating your home with plasma-vaporized garbage: We've discussed it before -- plasma gassification -- now it seems Florida's St. Lucie County and company Geoplasma are developing the first US plasma gasification plant to vaporize 1,500 tons of trash a day and product 60mW of turbine-spun electricity (50K homes worth of juice). The plasma involved is 10K degrees F (5,500ish C/5,800ish K).

For those without, fast Internet over powerlines
IBM and energy company rethink an old idea: IBM and International Broadband Electric Communications have agreed to have IBM install Broadband over Power Line (BPL) networks at electric cooperatives in the eastern US so IBEC can provide broadband services to underserved residents in rural America.

A step closer to the flying car?
New from the military mad scientist division: Darpa announces the Personal Air Vehicle Technology project, an attempt to build a working prototype of a two-to-four-passenger, military-suitable flying car that can drive on roads or take off like a helicopter. Darpa is shooting for 60/150MPH (land/air) with a flight time of two hours on a single tank. The group figures it'll need "morphing wings" for a smooth transition from road to sky; "optimized disk loading" propulsion (whatever that is); and strong flight control software (a wing and a prayer and a programmer?). At least actor Avery Brooks can relax -- he will probably get that flying car.

Cell/B.E. Security SDK: Six programming examples

ISO_ENCRYPT_SEC := ALL
ISO_KERN_KEY = /etc/pki/cell-spu-isolation/loader/loader.app_encrypt_key.public.pem

Faster than a speeding bullet: LANL Roadrunner makes TIME Top Ten list ...

... of technology for 2008: Yes, the LANL Roadrunner (see disclaimer for name usage) is number 10 on TIME magazine's "Best Inventions of 2008" list:

On May 26, at 3:30 in the morning, a $133 million supercomputer nicknamed Roadrunner broke the long-sought-after petaflop barrier: 1 quadrillion calculations per second. Built by IBM for Los Alamos National Laboratory, Roadrunner will be used primarily to simulate the effects of aging on nuclear weapons. Next up: the exaflop barrier.

The other nine before LANL Roadrunner:

1. The Retail DNA Test.
2. The Tesla Roadster.
3. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
4. Hulu.com.
5. The Large Hadron Collider.
6. The Global Seed Vault.
7. The Chevy Volt.
8. Bullets That Shoot Bullets.
9. The Orbital Internet.

LANL Roadrunner takes a Tekne Award
A win for superior computing in Minnesota: IBM-Rochester received a Tekne Award for the LANL Roadrunner supercomputer (see disclaimer for name usage). Specifically, the company won the IT-Software & Hardware, Communications and Infrastructure award for the hybrid that is the first computer to break the petaflop barrier. (A Tekne Award acknowledges companies and individuals who have demonstrated superior technology advancement and leadership in Minnesota. There is no requirement that this superiority has to also manifest itself outside of MN, but it usually does.)

Catching up with LANL Roadrunner?
Is Cray closing in?: Oak Ridge National Labs just tested its newly installed AMD-based Cray XT5 supercomputer ("Jaguar") and it peaked out at 1.64pflops, just under the 1.7pflops peak for the Cell/B.E.-/Opteron hybrid LANL Roadrunner (see disclaimer for name usage), in essence making it the world's fastest computer for (non-military) science research.

Design on a dime: Folding@home awarded for its good design

PS3 at heart of distributed, sharing system: The StanfordU Folding@home project has just grabbed the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry's Good Design Award for outstanding design in industrial and consumer products. (Folding@home is a distributed PS3 network, chock full of Cell/B.E. processors and visualizer software, designed to let users share idle PS3 time with scientists studying protein folding.) According to the jury: "Analysis of proteins for the purpose of shedding light on diseases is just one example of solution design for social issues, a stance that indicates the direction that design should take in the future. Motivating the people who will be involved in these studies will be the key to success, but the program functions well as an idea for making participation in this project visible on a global scale."

Games people play: Two perspectives on simulation performance

Per cost and raw performance: In the excellent ars technica thinkpiece "Putting the PS3's brain to work," Matt Ford details an article from the Journal of Physical Review E: Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics ("Accuracy of the lattice-Boltzmann method using the Cell processor") that discusses the computer simulation transition from faster and faster single processors to large multiprocessing systems. The article compares how two Cell/B.E. systems -- the PS3 (best performance per cost) and an IBM QS20/QS21 blade server (best for raw performance) -- handles simulations. The group was trying to determine whether the Cell/B.E. processor's inability to accurately represent floating-point numbers caused a significant loss of precision in the simulations.

(Lattice Boltzmann is a relatively new simulation technique for complex fluid systems. Traditional methods solve the conservation equations of macroscopic properties -- mass, momentum, and energy -- numerically; LB models the fluid consisting of fictive particles and such particles perform consecutive propagation and collision processes over a discrete lattice mesh. Because of its particulate nature and local dynamics, LB has advantages in dealing with complex boundaries, incorporating of microscopic interactions, and parallelization of the algorithm.)

Trends and tradeoffs: YDL says hello to Fixstars Solutions

Terra Soft becoming part of Fixstars: Terra Soft Solutions (Yellow Dog Linux) and Fixstars (a company specializing in Cell/B.E. software) announced that Terra Soft has been bought by Fixstars and will be known as Fixstars Solutions. Many YDL users are acquainted (at least peripherally) with TSS's CEO Kai Staats; Staats will continue on as Fixstars Solutions's COO. The original Fixstars provided Cell/B.E.-based solutions in Japan using YDL, so the company thought it might be a good match to bring YDL development into the fold. The new company will continue work on Linux for the Power architecture with a primary focus on Cell/B.E. systems.

Product watch: Toshiba's upscaling TV

Cell/B.E. speed makes HD TV prettier: Why are we talking about television? Because the heart of the Toshiba Regza 42ZV555D and 46ZV555D TVs -- the first "upscaling" TVs according to the company -- is the Cell Broadband Engine processor.

What's "upscaling"? HD TVs have something called an upscaler built in -- what it does is convert video that is shot at a different resolution to the screen to fit the screen (if you didn't, you'd get a small picture in the center of a big screen). The upscaling hardware:

• Stretches the picture to fit.
• Applies video processing to make the picture look as good as possible.
• Applies processing to convert standard-definition, interlaced pictures into progressive ones because LCD and plasma TVs can only display a progressive image. (With an interlaced image, you see the odd lines then the even ones; with a progressive image, you see all the lines sweeping left to right at the same time.)

Where does the Cell/B.E. processor come in? Faster processing, better quality.

From the Cell/B.E. Architecture forum

This blog-based column looks at some of the more interesting problems and challenges posed recently in the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture forum.

jlabellan84 wants to know if SDK 3.0 apps will play nice with SDK 3.1: I have two questions about SDK3.1:

• Are there problems with backward compatibility? That is, will my applications developed in SDK3.0 run in SDK3.1? and my ALF applications?
• Is it possible to update my PS3 with SDK3.1?

[IBM SDK Service Administrator]: Yes, 3.0 applications will run on 3.1. While we have not done testing on PS3s, it should work the same as 3.0.

redMoon started this in September 2008 when he asked for help to install SDK 3.0 on a PS3 with Fedora Core 8. There are now three forum pages of troubleshooting advice, including whether all the ISOs have been mounted (and how you tell); how to do some manual installation; device file name changes; why installing numactl and blas is important; the whys of using ppu-embedspu instead of embedspu; and more.

People still want to know more about how to install simulator.sdk on Ubuntu: Back in June, iamrohitbanga wanted to know a definitive solution to converting rpm files to debian so he could install the SDK simulator. jgrossm1 suggested IBM Cell SDK/SDK for Multicore Acceleration on Debian/Ubuntu HOWTO. mkistler suggested that "In my experience, the message error while loading shared libraries: libtcl8.4.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory means that the loader could not find libtcl8.4.so when it is trying to load the shared libraries needed by the simulator executable. Is the directory containing libtcl8.4.so in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH?"

The latest in the saga from kauboyhere: I get the same error as mentioned by iamrohitbanga. I installed systemsim-cell 3.0 from its .rpm package using Alien, on Ubuntu 8.04; when I tried ../run_gui from systemsim-cell/run/cell/linux in the Terminal, I got the /opt/ibm/systemsim-cell/bin/systemsim-cell: error while loading shared libraries: libtcl8.4.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory error, as mentioned earlier. I was able to locate the libtcl8.4.so file in my /usr/lib directory. Any solution? tcl8.4 and tk8.4 are installed already.

[choosyg]: I also had serious troubles converting the rpms to deb packages on Hardy, it seems to be a problem with alien/dpkg. Finaly i installed Gutsy and the very same script worked out well. Then i was able to install the simulator deb packages on Hardy and it works fine.

Now the simulatro works, but using spu-gcc failes with the following Message:

/opt/cell/toolchain/bin/spu-gcc -W -Wall -Winline -Wno-main -I. -I 
/opt/cell/sysroot/usr/spu/include -I 
/opt/cell/sysroot/opt/cell/sdk/usr/spu/include -O3 -c wavelet_spu.c
/tmp/ccxZAQnm.s: Assembler messages:
/tmp/ccxZAQnm.s:7: Error: alignment not a power of 2
/tmp/ccxZAQnm.s:11: Error: no such instruction: `hbrr .L8,printf'
/tmp/ccxZAQnm.s:12: Error: no such instruction: `stqd $80,-16($sp)'
/tmp/ccxZAQnm.s:13: Error: no such instruction: `il $80,0'
...

The same program/makefile workes fine on my Fedora 7 System with Simulator.

Panajev2001a wants to know what environmental variable SPE_START_DEBUG does (in reference to gdb debugging).

[IBM SDK Service Administrator]: Information I found:

SPU_DEBUG_START and SPU_INFO were used to set the newly created SPU threads in a sleep state after creation. libspe2 then displayed a message how to connect to the SPU thread with spu-gdb via stderr. Today's combined debugger has different ways to attach to newly created SPU threads. For example GDB has a new command set spu stop-on-load [on|off]. With this set to on the newly created SPU thread is also stopped by GDB itself.

The code for SPU_DEBUG_START and SPU_INFO is still in libspe2 to support the libspe1-to-2 wrapper. So if you set these variables it should show the original behavior of stopping then SPU threads. But this is something that has not been tested (or supported) since the combined debugger was released.

Cell/B.E. Security SDK: APIs: PPE-assisted functions

printf(“This is a %s call with %d parameters.\n”, “PPE-assisted call”,
     (int) 3);

size of auxiliary buffer = 16 + 3*16 + (48 + 32) + 32 = 176 bytes

#include <libisolation.h>

int change_ppuassist_buf_len(unsigned int new_len)

Product watch: SDK 3.1 documentation available

Version 3.1 of the SDK for Multicore Acceleration is here: With new documentation and links to the exciting new IBM Systems Information Center, a single, searchable Web place where the documentation is "live."