IBM to use Cell in Blade Servers

taskforce writes "IBM announced on Wednesday that it would be putting versions of its Cell processor inside its increasingly popular low-power blade servers by this summer. From the article: 'For Cell to gain wide acceptance, IBM needs to spur outside programmers to write software that takes advantage of Cell's prowess. That could prove more challenging than usual because Cell's architecture is so different. IBM hopes this summer's release of the Cell-based servers kick-starts work by third-party programmers.'" Also covered in a PCPro article.

Comments

How about a free optimizing compiler

[mi]

a free optimizing compiler, that takes advantage of the architecture, would do wonders...

It being command-line compatible with (or simply a back-end of) an existing compiler like gcc is even better.

Add a port of a good OS, and your platform is suddenly incredibly attractive to developers.

Re:How about a free optimizing compiler

[ajs]

And of course, optimizing in that way is probably analogous to the halting problem, but that doesn't mean that a good general-purpose back-end for GCC could not be written. History teaches us one thing about specialized hardware that we should never forget: the average user of your hardware is going to need to have VERY LITTLE of their code hand-tuned for it. For example, let's say that this hardware tends to be very good at encryption. Your average user would likely be running a Web server or some other sort of networking technology, and almost NONE of that code cares about the 10-100 hand-tuned routines in OpenSSL that you wrote for this platform.

Get a good compiler and general-purpose OS up and running fast (which, by the way, I'm sure IBM is doing), and you'll see many more people writing special-purpose code where they need it.

Linux on Cell

[morgan_greywolf]

Considering they've already got Linux on Cell and a proposed model for making userland apps to take advantage of the SPUs, and have had these since last summer, I wouldn't be surprised if some open source code is already in the process of being ported.

Anyone know of any specific server apps?

PS3 release date?

[nutshell42]

This probably means that the PS3 will either actually make its "spring" release or that it is hampered by problems with the Blu-Ray drives/disks instead of a Cell shortage because otherwise I couldn't imagine that Sony would allow IBM to use even one Cell for something that's not a PS3 for the first 3 months.