Hi Paul, Some pointers about the PS3: instead of yellow dog, opensuse 10.3ppc seems to be better implemented (at least I am more used to it), and has a set of cell development tools coming right out of the package. yes the amount of ram is a big problem, I have tried implementing a swap on a very fast flash memory card, at least to lighten the problem, but once you format the card, the performance drops significantly. I will be playing with it as soon as I have time. Since this is a console, it is -very- hard to tinker with the ram, it is a bga chip soldered directly on the second level of mainboard pcb, you need a wave soldering technique to remove&replace it. In fact, there is a doable method if you are feeling lucky, by using a heat gun you can remove the chip, and solder back again with applying flux & solder to the pads beforehand, assuming you are -very- good with the heat gun and do not fry the chips right away, there are still three problems: 1)since this is a console, the communication between the cpu and the ram will most probably be carried on a trusted platform, to prevent copied games from running, thus changing the chip will tend to brick the system even if you are good with soldering. 2) where do you plan to buy the xddr3 chip? Vandalize from a graphics card perhaps? But then again you need to find the exact amount PS3 uses... 3) How do you plan the architecture to recognize the ram you have installed? XDDR3 is a multi chip platform, and most probably you should replace also the controller.
as with the programming, you should be aware that cell programming is not equal to usual parallel programming, in fact the idea is in some sense reversed, in the cell, the inter-communication is cheap but the ram available to each node is very low (256 kB) and the processors themselves are rather low performance. So you should divide your program to small&and easy blocks as much as possible, otherwise you get a terrible performance. I nowadays plan to experiment with the new fftw3.2alpha with cell support to see if there is a difference. well, if you are looking for some alternatives, what about nvidia tesla? It is basically a high end fpu& generic development tools added to your pc via a pci-x slot. I am very optimistic about this technology, looking at the amount of work a gpu can pull of nowadays. The FPU is not very good at generic calculations, but luckily FFT is one of the strong points. As soon as I have the money&time I will try implementing it. Best, O. Baris Malcioglu METU Physics. PhD. Candidate Ankara
