Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Cell-based Server Blade Demonstrated

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the showing-it-off dept.

slashflood writes "Only a few clients in a hotel room near Los Angeles had the chance to see the first Cell based server blade running Linux 2.6.11. 'We demonstrated the prototype to show that Cell continues to mature. The product is expected to have several times higher performance compared to conventional servers,' said an IBM engineer."

8 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Interesting quote from the article by damiam · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sony's 2TFlops number for the PS3 includes the NVidia graphics chip, which has an insanely high FLOPS count but isn't really useful for general-purpose computation.

    --
    It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  2. Re:Very promising technology= investment opportuni by soricine · · Score: 5, Informative

    After you've read Blatchford's write-up, read this for a reality check:

    http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050124-4551 .html

    It uses such terms as 'hogwash' and 'wild-eyed and completely unsubstantiated claims'. Ouch.

  3. Re:I'm just curious by Michael+Hunt · · Score: 4, Informative

    'factoring prime numbers'?

    You mean deriving the factors of products of primes, right?

    --
    You're doing it wrong.
  4. Re:Deep thought... by bersl2 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I saw some code flying around on a mailing list somewhere. This looks good enough:

    http://seclists.org/lists/linux-kernel/2005/May/26 57.html

  5. Re:Now we just need to ask it tough questions! by MyNymWasTaken · · Score: 3, Informative

    I wonder if anyone knows how close we are to the power of the human brain yet.

    How do measure the computational power of the human brain?

    Here's a 6 year old napkin calculation.

    They give a figure of 10^8 MIPS. Figure 1:8 for a MIPS:MFLOPS ratio. So ~13 TFLOPS.

    The IBM Blue Gene/L is the current record holder at 135 TFLOPS. That puts it at the power of 10 human brains if that napkin calculation has any validity.

    For average consumer computers...

    The ordinary computer of Aug. 2004 performed 18,000 MIPS. Ref

    Human brain power is ~12.44 Moore's law cycles away from that point. That gives 19-25 years.

    So, your computer should be more powerful than your brain by 2030.

  6. It's not Sony's hype by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    IBM designed the Cell

  7. Re:Deep thought... by megan_of_wutai · · Score: 3, Informative

    They already have.
    One of the more interesting posts: http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/5/13/218
    Arnd Bergmann works for IBM, btw.

  8. Carmack has tried... by Namarrgon · · Score: 3, Informative
    Carmack explored threading the Quake3 engine pretty thoroughly - and concluded that it really didn't help much, due to the nature of the problem - high-bandwidth communication between threads.

    Some types of computing problems (e.g the compositing app I work on) multithread very well, and some just don't.

    It's possible Q3A might thread better on a Cell, due to high bandwidth between SPEs - but then again, he was using a the second thread for vertex processing, which is done by the GPU these days anyway.

    --
    Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?