Analysis of Parallel Multidimensional Wave Digital Filtering Network on IBM Cell Broadband Engine

Abstract

As an alternative approach for the numerical integration of physical systems, the MDWDF technique has become of importance in the field of numerical analysis due to its attractive features, for example, massive parallelism and high accuracy both inherent in nature. In this study, speed-up efficiencies of a MDWDF network are studied for the linearized shallow water system, which plays an important role in fluid dynamics. To achieve the goal, the full parallelism of the MDWDF network is established in the first place based on the chained MD retiming technique. Following the implementation on the IBM Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/BE), excellent performance of the full parallel architecture is revealed. The IBM Cell/BE containing 1 power processor element (PPE) and 8 synergistic processor elements (SPEs) perfectly fits the architecture of the retimed MDWDF model. Empirical results have demonstrated that the full parallelized model with 8 processors (1PPE + 7SPEs) outperforms the other three models: partial right/left-loop retimed models and the full sequential model with 4× improvements for scheduled grids 51×51. In addition, for scheduled fine grids 201×201, the full parallel model is shown to possess significant performance over these models by up to 7× improvements.