A cellular architecture is a type of

computer architecture In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, the ...

prominent in parallel computing. Cellular architectures are relatively new, with IBM's

Cell microprocessor Cell is a multi-core microprocessor microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose PowerPC core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as m ...

being the first one to reach the market. Cellular architecture takes multi-core architecture design to its logical conclusion, by giving the programmer the ability to run large numbers of concurrent threads within a single processor. Each 'cell' is a compute node containing thread units, memory, and communication. Speed-up is achieved by exploiting thread-level parallelism inherent in many applications. Cell, a cellular architecture containing 9 cores, is the processor used in the

PlayStation 3 The PlayStation 3 (PS3) is a home video game console developed by Sony Computer Entertainment. The successor to the PlayStation 2, it is part of the PlayStation brand of consoles. It was first released on November 11, 2006, in Japan, November ...

. Another prominent cellular architecture is Cyclops64, a massively parallel architecture currently under development by IBM. Cellular architectures follow the low-level programming paradigm, which exposes the programmer to much of the underlying hardware. This allows the programmer to greatly optimize their code for the platform, but at the same time makes it more difficult to develop software.

External links

Cellular architecture builds next generation supercomputers

ORNL, IBM, and the Blue Gene Project

* ttps://github.com/wso2/reference-architecture/blob/master/reference-architecture-cell-based.md Cell-based Architecture {{CPU_technologies Parallel computing Computer architecture Classes of computers