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Cell-based Server Blade Demonstrated
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."
These things work fine alone, but when connected together they really shine. Built-in clustering hardware interfaces makes this a nerd's wet dream.
Putting them together into a rackable case looks to be very cool and finally putting a nail in the Windows coffin will be a delicious treat for IBM (the Cell ain't x86).
I can't wait to get my hands on my PS3 and see what I can do.
In the meantime, I just wish IBM had Cell samples available for a reasonable price. I just can't afford one for hacking yet!
Guess it is time to invest in Sony and IBM! This technology really looks promising, especially when you read this article --> http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell5.htm l
The first Cell based desktop computer will be the fastest desktop computer in the industry by a very large margin. Even high end multi-core x86s will not get close. Companies who produce microprocessors or DSPs are going to have a very hard time fighting the power a Cell will deliver. We have never seen a leap in performance like this before and I don't expect we'll ever see one again, It'll send shock-waves through the entire industry and we'll see big changes as a result.
"If operated at 3 GHz, Cell's theoretical performance reaches about 200 GFLOPS, which works out to about 400 GFLOPS per board"
From TFA. Interesting, considering that they're claiming that the PS3 will run 5-10 faster than this.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
Ok, so the way I see it, we have invented a lot of ways to increase our MIPS and our processing power.. something along the lines of this->
..what next?
.5? Any supercomputer geeks care to postulate?
1) Single CPU
2) Multiple CPU
3) Multiple Machines in a grid with single CPUs
4) Multiple Machines in a grid with multiple CPUs
5) Multiple grids with many machines
6) Multiple cores in a single CPU
7) Multiple cores in multiple CPUs
7) Multiple cores in multiple CPUs in a grid
8)
We also went from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to now 64-bit and beyond. 64-bit words.. nice! Of course, more parallelism means more threads for more simultaneous processes, and 64-bit means twice as much "word" space than 32-bit, but what next?
It's truly mind boggling, and it's a great time to be in IS/IT!
What I want to know is, how much further? How can we increase the multiples more? For example, what happened to quantum processing and multiple states for a bit instead of 0 and 1? When can I count my bits 0, 1 and
Imagine OS X on cell... with the collusion between Apple and IBM, and OS X running on open hardware... This could be the killer OS that supplants windows.
Linux wont do it (not in the desktop arena, it does kick ass in the server area though) but OS X could very well.
That would be something to see, and I would bet, that much software that was OS X capable on Cell would ALSO be Linux capable (perhaps a recompile by the vendor? maybe native... not certan here.)
Would be nice to have a stable easy to use OS as the dominant platform. Of course, the irony would be that if this did become the case, then I suppose that Apple would eventually become as lazy and as dominant as Microsoft.
*sigh*
Still, nice to dream!
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
It is exciting...but (not to sound trollish)...I'll believe it when I see it.
This won't go anywhere if IBM doesn't clean up its blade management console.
I've been doing extensive research on blade servers recently for my company, and when it comes down to it, IBM's centralized management for blade servers is hands down the worst in the industry. RLX used to be the best, but they're out of the business now. HP was #2, now they're the leader. Egenera is doing some really cool things, but their setup is just way too expensive (almost 5 times the price of the other leading blade systems).
So, even if these cell blades were to be the coolest thing ever, if IBM doesn't make an investment into improving their management software, no one's going to buy these things unless they already have a large investment in IBM hardware or are just downright masochistic.
Basically, what it comes down to is, someone needs to buy the RLX software, it's on the market now. If I were IBM, I'd buy this and retool it for IBM blades. What I'm scared of is Dell buying the RLX software. Dell blades suck, but with the RLX console, even I would consider buying Dell blades, that RLX management software is just that good.
In short, if I were IBM, I'd buy RLX in a second, and catapult myself to being the industry leader in blade servers.
---
"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
I am curious to see how this will work out, especially since the Apple+Intel article came out in the Wall Street Journal.
)
(Think Secret's take: http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0505itunes49.html
I think this is a better indication for Apple's future processors, as opposed to the Intel rumours.
If IBM has ported the Linux kernel to the Cell processor, does that mean that they have to release the source code as a derivative work of the GPL if they ever sell a Cell-Blade with Linux?
Illegal? Samir, This is America.
Just wondering, could one or more of the supplementary cores be used for translating x86 instructions to RISC (and back) for the Cells main processor? I'm not really familiar with the Cell's architecture but it'd be interesting to see what companies like VMWare could do if this was the case.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
a straight webserver i doubt would be much help, however i bet a database or something similar doing lots of sorting/searching could probably be greatly improved by the design of the cell architecture. they tend to deal alot with organized and comparing serialized data.
Well,
If the Cell has low enough heat to be fitted in a blade, perhaps a future version could be cooled well enough to find its way into a PowerBook?
Would *that* shut up the "Apple has to switch to Intel to have faster cooler laptop chips!!! or they're D000000Med!!!!! " crowd? Maybe? Perhaps?
You'd that that with all the time & $ invested, they'd at least show 'em off with active cooling a bit more advanced than the BIG sink/BIG fan combo.
An alpha teaser I wonder, or a bit of intended misdirection?
Was it really an engineer who said these things?
If so, did he say them of his own accord, or was he instructed to say certain things? And even if that is so, it is still refreshing to hear somebody besides a marketing or management bot speak to the press.
Read up on neural networks :) The brain can be measured more accurately in complexity of its connections. When we can start simulating neural networks with trillions of connections all running in parallel and sending signals a few times a second, then we'll be there. Not only would the computer be aware like we are, but itd think faster too, i.e. it would realize something is happening or the proper action to take faster then we currently can.
Regards
Steve
With Cell, IBM keeps talking about "theoretical GFLOPS". I don't care about theoretical numbers. What I care about is how fast the thing runs when I run normal code compiled with a normal compiler and (possibly hand-optimized) numerical libraries.
So, what kind of SPECfp numbers does the thing get? What kind of BLAS performance does it get?
They have 2.6.11 running on it, so compiling the benchmarks should be trivial. If they haven't published anything yet (I haven't seen it), we have to believe that the numbers are less than impressive.
(Another company used to make inflated claims about the performance of their processors by computing theoretical maximums for a few SIMD instructions, unachievable in most real code. When people actually did some real benchmarks and published them against the wishes of the company, they found that their processor was no faster MHz for MHz than Pentium on real code with real compilers.)
"What kind of servers *ARE* these??"
Cheap ones.... at least as far as IBM is concerned. A large chunk of the money customers are paying is no longer going to be poured straight into the bank account of their competitor, Intel. They can either make huge mark-ups, or more likely bump up the specs to amazing levels to add to the buzz around Cell.
IBM's long-term strategy always has been to position the Power architecture as the successor to x86, so this is a logical move, after their success in ensuring that every console game programmer in the world will be writing for their chips. IBM wants your next computer to be Power or Cell based, running either OSX or Linux. Just like PC makers always do, they are putting their top-of-the-line chip into servers first, then when production ramps up, it will trickle down the range.
What I'm wondering is if they would have better throughput with the triple-core chip that's going into the Xbox360, which seems at first glance to be a better general-purpose device.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I don't know why people pan these things as servers. Are people not aware that there's more to contemporary computing that HTTP daemons and database transactions?
I work in the biotech industry and we use computer farms and grids for all sorts of computationally intensive tasks: biopolymer sequence alignments, docking simulations, protein modeling, high-throughout 3D mass spectral analysis, etc.
A server with cell-blades and some minor tweaks to our software would generate a tremendous "bang-for-the-buck".