GMP on the Cell processor

[Paul Leyland]

On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 20:15, Torbjorn Granlund wrote:
>   Has anyone on this list thought of porting GMP to the Cell processor?
>   Would anyone be interested in using GMP if it was on the Cell?
> 
> I think it would be tricky to make a port that would do justice to the
> Cell.  The parallelism in GMP is fine-grained, at least as long as the
> operands are not really huge.

I've been giving it some thought recently, but the pressure of Real Life
(TM) and, especially, Real Work has been such that the thought hasn't
got very far yet.

Your (Torbjorn) analysis is accurate but not the whole story, IMO.

My interest is primarily in integer factorization, several algorithms
for which are trivially parallelizable and computationally demanding (as
opposed to memory-intensive).  ECM is probably the best example but
there are others, including some which are subroutines for other
algorithms such as NFS.  Other algorithms are not entirely trivial to
parallelize but the Chinese Remainder Theorem provides an obvious entry
point into their parallelization.

Running 7 copies of stage 1 of ECM suimultaneously, each with the same N
but different curves, on the SPUs of a PS3 using their local memory is
*very* attractive.   Their second stages, which are very memory-hungry,
would then be farmed out either to the main PPC or to other more
conventional machines.

GMP for the SPU, a stripped down version if necessary to get it to fit
in the limited memory, would be very welcome indeed.


Paul
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