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Cell Making Inroads in High Performance Computing |
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Wednesday, 13 September 2006 |
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IBM has been making some significant Cell-related announcements of late. Last week, IBM revealed that they had won the contract to build the worlds fastest supercomputer for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and that the system (named Roadrunner) would incorporate 16,000 Cell processors and target over one petaflop of floating-point performance. This was an extremely high-profile win for both IBM and the Cell processor, and it will no doubt go a long way towards raising interest in the Cell BE and what it is capable of; industry will view a high-profile contract with the US Energy Department as a tacit endorsement of both Cell's stability and utility. As such, it was no surprise that IBM announced just yesterday that volume shipments of it's Cell-based BladeCenter QS20 server have begun for corporate customers.
Based on two 3.2GHz Cell processors sharing between them 1GB of XDR memory, the BladeCenter QS20 is already being deployed by major clients, including the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, Canadian-based platform development house RapidMind, Inc., and the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics research firm in Germany. In addition, IBM is marketing the QS20 actively to customers in the animation, medical, aerospace, defense, and oil/gas industries as a solution that can aid them greatly in addressing some of the most time and proccessor-intensive tasks they are regularly faced with. This in turn is expected to save QS20 customers time, money, space, and electricity relative to more standard alternatives.
Although IBM has not publicly announced the price of the BladeCenter QS20, it is reported that the system will cost customers roughly $19,000 per unit. |
