After a Cell Broadband Engine program
executes without errors on the PPE and the SPEs, optimization through parameter-tuning
can begin.
Programmers typically tune for performance using algorithmic methods. This
is important for SPE programming also. But equally important for SPE programming
is performance tuning through the elimination of stalls. There are two forms
of stalls to consider:
- instruction dependency stalls, and
- data stalls.
Instruction stalls can be analyzed statically or dynamically.