[Insight-users] ITK on Cell Broadband Engine

[Daniele Domenichelli]

Sorry, this reply was supposed to be sent to the mailing list, not
only to Luis...

---

Hello Luis,

At the moment I'm just doing some tests on the simulator, but we'll
have soon at the University of Genoa, Italy a blade QS21 (2 processor
with 1 PPU and 8 SPU each). It will run Linux and I think I will try
to compile code with both gcc and xlc (IBM compiler for Cell BE).

Searching for "itk ibm cell" on google I found some presentations by
Mayo Clinic (for example
http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/cell/pdf/IBM_Mayo_Demo.pdf) but I
could not understand if they used ITK or not in their final
application.


I'd try to compile CMake on the simulator but it will take a very long
time, because it is really slow. I'll try as soon as the blade is
ready. It should compile, as the ppu is just a PowerPC. Anyway I don't
know if CMake can be used, IBM uses two different toolchains for ppu
and spu code and Makefiles are really simple:

# spu dir Makefile
PROGRAM_spu   := hello_spu
LIBRARY_embed := hello_spu.a
include $(CELL_TOP)/buildutils/make.footer

# ppu dir Makefile
DIRS = spu
PROGRAM_ppu = hello_be1
IMPORTS = spu/hello_spu.a –lspe2 -lpthread
include $(CELL_TOP)/buildutils/make.footer

(I don't have "make.footer" at the moment, but I can get it if you
wish to see it).

There is probabily some work to do on CMake to make it work for both
ppu and spu and for linking spu-executables in ppu-executable.
Or maybe it can be handled with ADD_CUSTOM_COMMAND, as suggested in the thread.
There should also be a way to load external spu-executables or maybe I
could build it just to compile ITK then use Makefiles instead of CMake
for my application.

Do you think that ITK should be build twice (for ppu and for spu) or
just for ppu?


Regards,
Daniele




2008/5/12 Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com>:
>
>  Hi Daniele,
>
>  This sounds quite interesting.
>
>  Are you using a Playstation3 for this ?
>  or another IBM cell based machine ?
>
>  Can we assume that you are running Linux in this machine
>  and that you are planning to use gcc ?
>
>  The first thing to try is building CMake on this machine.
>
>  You may want to look at the following discussion trail
>  in the CMake List:
>
>  http://www.cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/2008-January/018934.html
>
>
>    Regards,
>
>
>       Luis
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>  Daniele Domenichelli wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I'm starting to develop an imaging application that will run on IBM Cell
> BE.
> > I successfully used ITK for some applications, so I was guessing if I
> > could use them on that architecture.
> > Anyone tried to use or to optimize any ITK algorithms on Cell?
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Daniele Domenichelli
> > _______________________________________________
> > Insight-users mailing list
> > Insight-users at itk.org
> > http://www.itk.org/mailman/listinfo/insight-users
> >
> >
>