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The first-ever class on the Playstation 3's Cell Broaband Engine has just wrapped up over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During the four-week course students learned about the new microprocessor and designed and implemented projects on Playstation 3s. The student with the best project, a 3D version of Pong, presented their work at this year's Game Developers Conference.
The course, which focused mainly on parallel programming, was taught by Saman Amarasinghe, a professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Dr. Rodric Rabbah of IBM.
"The fact that students - with no background in parallel programming or the Cell/B.E.- were able to get their projects done from scratch in just about one month largely goes to show the capability and determination of our students, coupled with the availability of a robust toolchain for Cell/B.E. development," said Saman Amarasinghe, Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT."Cell/B.E. is going to be an underlying architecture that has the potential to be included in a wide range of industry applications and solutions in the future," said Dr. Rodric Rabbah, IBM Research. "This course was able to break down the details of a highly complex microprocessor and challenge students to see where the performance, power and versatility could be applied outside of gaming. Based on the feedback we received from the students, it was a tremendous success."
I've heard rumblings that some U.S. Defense project companies are playing around with Cell technology too.
