Upcoming Workshop to Focus on Developing Commercial Applications and Productivity Software for Cell Broadband Engine Processor.

The Georgia Tech College of Computing today announced the renewal of the Sony Corporation/Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.-Toshiba-IBM Center of Competence, based on Georgia Tech’s exceptional work in multiple areas of research and evangelism for the Cell Broadband Engine technology. Through Georgia Tech’s efforts, the STI Center has been responsible for creating and disseminating software optimized for Cell/B.E. systems, and for performing research on the design of Cell/B.E. systems, algorithms and applications. In conjunction with this renewal of the STI Center, Georgia Tech is announcing a series of new research projects that are being undertaken at the center to develop applications and productivity tools based on the Cell/B.E. microprocessor.

Georgia Tech also announced today that it will host the Second Annual Cell/B.E. Processor Workshop from July 10-11, 2008, focusing on software, tools and applications for the Cell/B.E. processor, including high performance computing applications and programmability tools. The two-day workshop is sponsored by Sony Group, Toshiba and IBM and will be held at the Klaus Advanced Computing Building on Georgia Tech’s campus. More information on the workshop may be found at http:/sti.cc.gatech.edu/.

The STI Center of Competence was created at Georgia Tech to test the boundaries and demonstrate the extreme performance of the Cell/B.E. architecture. One of the key research challenges that the collaborators will address through continued applied research is the use of Cell/B.E. technology to better monitor an aircraft’s structural safety in commercial and military airplanes. Researchers will develop Cell/B.E. based data-processing software that will expeditiously and accurately monitor structural components in flight by measuring and recording an aircraft’s vibrations through a distributed network of sensors.

Although a commercial signal processing application for airplanes is a long term plan, researchers are working to develop a solid software foundation in the labs.

The other joint research projects in productivity enhancements include:

A useful signal processing kernel needed for oil and gas exploration and seismic monitoring;

Data compression, used for file compression or reducing the size of messages sent between computers required in multiple industries;
Financial services applications for consolidated debt optimization, as well as European and American options pricing;

Encryption libraries for securing communications for privacy;
High-speed multimedia codecs, such as MPEG2 and JPEG2000 encoders and decoders;

Bioinformatics, such as DNA sequence alignment and comparison;
Software productivity enhancement tools that involve a cross-platform profiler, performance estimation and tuning system with IDE type features.Single-source automatic translator for generating PPU and SPU codes from a monolithic C/C++ application.