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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."
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.
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
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.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
anyone here who's ever worked on Final Cut, After Effects, Motion, Logic, Shake, or Maya or any number of hundreds of applications that often require seconds to HOURS of rendering can imagine Cell processors in their Macs, you collective morons that say stupid things like "why do you need a DSP processor to make file serving go faster"?
Some of us in content creation could use a little help here...
That some people are stumped by the utility of using Cell processors in Apple-built blade servers to take the place of XServes, or for what purpose would there be in 1-4 Cells in the Mac of the average Joe makes me really doubt the usefullness of our public schools.
Power users being able to add 15 animation effects with translucency and kenetics in Motion to a video with 8 layers of HD video and then watch it automatically copy straight to a DVD-R - without rendering time - makes us wet with anticipation...
and wondering when the hell hard drives are going to be able to catch up.
I would easily give up my right nut for a Apple-based blade server now that the Pro apps are starting to use XGrid for co-processing the heavy lifting portions of our work. My DVD projects of 2 hours still take long over an hour to render 2-pass MPEG2 on a high end DP G5. Multiples faster than realtime, could the Cell do.
But the average Joe? Why does Safari have to use a 8 core DSP? its doesn't, dumbass. But that's not all people do with their macs...
That iDVD render? What render? The lag is now your DVD burner - 100%.
Encoding settings for your iPod, vs. encoding settings for your files. iTunes could EASILY convert - on the fly - Apple Lossless encoded files to some kind of smaller, lossy codec as it filled your iPod. No waiting except for your iPod's slow-ass hard drive.
all this - while the Cell is still using a basic G5 at its core... so, no, Word isn't going to get any punch - but if Cell processors are as cheap as G5's, then what the hell is the issue here?
I'm damn ready for radical leaps in DSP... i'm fscking sick and tired of watching progress bars, DAMNIT! and if the Cell can do everything IBM says it can - hell, yeah, bring it on.
Server guys - try to think beyond your damn file services.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
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".