Parallel implementation of irregular terrain model on IBM cell broadband engine

Prediction of radio coverage, also known as radio "hearability" requires the prediction of radio propagation loss. The Irregular Terrain Model (ITM) predicts the median attenuation of a radio signal as a function of distance and the variability of the signal in time and in space. Algorithm can be applied to a large amount of engineering problems to make area predictions for applications such as preliminary estimates for system design, surveillance, and land mobile systems. When the radio transmitters are mobile, the radio coverage changes dynamically, taking on a real-time aspect that requires thousands of calculations per second, which can be achieved through the use of recent advances in multicore processor technology. In this study, we evaluate the performance of ITM on IBM Cell Broadband Engine (BE). We first give a brief introduction to the algorithm of ITM and present both the serial and parallel execution manner of its implementation. Then we exploit how to map out the program on the target processor in detail. We choose message queues on Cell BE which offer the simplest possible expression of the algorithm while being able to fully utilize the hardware resources. Full code segment and a complete set of terrain profiles fit into each processing element without the need for further partitioning. Communications and memory management overhead is minimal and we achieve 90.2% processor utilization with 7.9x speed up compared to serial version. Through our experimental studies, we show that the program is scalable and suits very well for implementing on the CELL BE architecture based on the granularity of computation kernels and memory footprint of the algorithm.