Blade Watch

http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/18918279.html

Earlier today IBM announced the new BladeCenter QS22, a new blade server that incorporates the latest Cell processor, the PowerXCell 8i. While the new name might not exactly roll off your tongue, IBM has managed to address one of the Cell’s major technical shortcomings (at least for the HPC crowd), namely much better double precision floating point performance.

Big Blue claims the PowerXCell 8i achieves nearly 109 double precision (DP) gigaflops. That’s on par with the 102 DP gigaflops provided by AMD’s FireStream 9170 GPU and is five times the DP floating point performance of the older Cell generation that inhabits PlayStation3 consoles. Since the QS22 packs two new Cell processors together, each blade delivers 217 gigaflops, which means a BladeCenter chassis will provide a whopping 3 teraflops if fully populated with QS22s. Memory capacity has been pumped up considerably too, thanks to moving from Rambus to DDR2. Up to 16 GB per processor is now supported (versus 1 GB on the previous generation).

Check out this is article talking about their new QS22 Cell B.E based blade which looks exciting, bringing enhanced memory support to the platform which should bring new possibilities and functionality, very cool.  It’s always good to see what others think of the products, what their view is, do check it out.

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