* IBM ships Cell-based blade
IBM last week started shipping its first blade server based on the Cell Broadband Engine.
The IBM BladeCenter QS20, which will become a part of an IBM-developed supercomputer cluster, is designed for computational- and graphics-intensive workloads such as compression, medical imaging or seismic processing. Cell BE was developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba for the upcoming PlayStation 3 gaming console.
“Capabilities that were once considered only in the context of the extreme high end of the server marketplace can now be found in some of the most common of consumer electronics,” says Clay Ryder, senior analyst for the Sageza Group. “The enormous computation and graphically intense capability of the Cell BE is just one example of this.”
The Cell BE is based on IBM’s Power Architecture and features a multi-core implementation. It also features two 3.2-GHz Cell BE processors per blade. Each chip features a Power Processing Element (PPE) with a local cache and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) with on-chip L1/L2 cache. They also feature memory and an I/O controller. The PPE is a 64-bit RISC processor; each SPE has 128-bit Simple Instruction Multiple Data capability. The QS20 is also equipped with Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand connectivity, and runs Fedora Linux.
IBM has claimed some early adopters of the blade and among them are the University of Manchester, RapidMind, and the Fraunhoffer Institute.
The IBM BladeCenter QS20 will be delivered via IBM’s System Cluster 1350, which is used in high-performance computing.
