IBM Adds Videogame Console Chips to Mainframes

GoIBMPS3 writes "Soon the powerful 'Cell' microprocessor that fuels Sony's PlayStation 3 console will be available in IBM mainframe computers. The intent is to allow high-performance machines to run complex online games and virtual worlds. 'The integration initially will be accomplished by networking the mainframe with IBM's Cell blades, but eventually the Cells will be plugged more directly into the mainframes via PCI adapter cards, IBM said. It's the latest twist in IBM's years-long effort to keep mainframes not only relevant but also cutting-edge. IBM is touting the partnership as an example of hybrid computing--a trend sweeping the high-performance computing industry as companies augment general-purpose servers with special-purpose chips that to accelerate particular tasks.'"

Comments

Also in the works:

[TinBromide]

IBM scrapped a wii-mote enabled server consoles for the management of online worlds.

However the prototype was destroyed in a freak bowling/mountain dew/pizza accident.

A number of BOFH episodes come to mind

[arivanov]

Some venerable BOFH episodes come to mind (though there it was VAX, not a mainframe).

PCI?

[MSTCrow5429]

They're going to plug in Cell CPUs into the mainframe via just plain PCI? Don't they mean PCI-X or PCI-E? I'd think using a Hypertransport bus would be perfect for co-processors, too.

Re:PCI?

[drinkypoo]

PCI is doubtless the cheapest option available. Many systems have multiple PCI buses, for example I used to have a system with a SiS chipset whose slots were split between two PCI buses, and it had an AGP8x and at least one additional internal PCI bus; it had both 32 and 64 bit PCI devices onboard (a RAID controller was on a 64 bit, 33MHz bus internally.) If the IBM mainframes that use PCI buses have enough of them, then it might be worth it. They might be envisioning this on a "mainframe" cluster, where you could distribute them throughout the network. Or of course, the person who wrote the article could simply be ignorant enough to not differentiate between multiple flavors of PCI. If we look at some other Stephen Shankland articles on C|Net we find that they tend to be very simple and formulaic, without any technical detail whatsoever. Just putting those letters "PCI" into the article must have just about killed him. Normally if you see a "word" in an article by him that isn't plain English, it's the name of some company.

Re:PCI?

[Jherek Carnelian]

PCI is doubtless the cheapest option available. Many systems have multiple PCI buses

One of the key features of the IBM mainframes is high-availability - the machines never go down. That means they have to support the ability to replace failing cards while the system is up. For PCI cards, that almost always means a dedicated PCI bus per PCI slot - so you can power down and reboot individual cards without affecting any other cards (because there are no other cards on the same bus to be affected).

I would be very surprised if the IBM mainframes did not implement each PCI slot with a dedicated bus, and thus also making the full bandwidth of the bus available to each PCI device.

Flying Cars!

[psydeshow]

Someday, in the future, a computer the size of a small room will be possible!
And it will be as powerful as today's most advanced videogames...

Makes quite a bit of sense to me

[jimicus]

Let's face it, nobody buys a mainframe unless they've already got a very specific use planned for it. It's not like an x86 server where it's cheap enough that you might think "We'll use it for X, but even if we don't, we'll use it for Y".

And the Cell isn't really intended for general-purpose use - it's far more appropriate to use it in a system where the code has been written and designed specifically for it.

What better market than one which is composed almost entirely of people with reasonably specific, defined needs?

Re:Makes quite a bit of sense to me

[Tim Browse]

Just what I remember though, I didn't devote much memory to it.

That's ok - the PS3 designers didn't devote much memory to the Cell processors either.

mainframs are perfect for MMORPGs

[geekoid]

You can create new servers on the fly,
Really high performance
Easily scalable,
and virtual worlds will never go down for any reason outside the code.
To try and replicate those efforts on PC servers is a waste of money.

Properly done, those issues that arise in many MMORPGs when a large percentage of their population goes to on area for an event....Blizzard I'm looking at you.

Re:mainframs are perfect for MMORPGs

[blincoln]

You can create new servers on the fly,
Really high performance
Easily scalable,
and virtual worlds will never go down for any reason outside the code.

Don't forget these added bonuses:

So expensive you could buy an entire data center's worth of x86 servers instead of leasing a single mainframe for a year.
Requires members of the dwindling cult of mainframe experts to administer.

For sale on Ebay

[MillionthMonkey]

I have a JCL script for a character I've been working on for months. He has five hundred hit points, six spells, a sword, a long sword, a battle axe, a print spool, and a suite of DB2 utilities.

Pay for shipping and I'll send you the punch cards.

Networks Ground to a Halt!

[willie_nelsons_pigta]

IT productivity took a plunge today on this announcement as millions of IT professionals stopped work dead in their tracks and began day-dreaming of the "after-hours" activities that they could get involved in.

More news at 11.

Re:Networks Ground to a Halt!

[OriginalArlen]

Very amusing, but seriously - when will low-end Cell CPU-powered boxes arrive? I'm thinking of the ProLiant / PowerEdge type servers, 1-6U commodity servers of the sort I'm planning to install in the new rack in my bedr^h^h^h E_TOO_MUCH_INFORMATION

(Come to that, what about middling-high end workstations of the sort most of us probably spend most of our day? I've the germ of a nice computer collection here, with a 68000, a Z80, various Pentium "0" and upwards intel boxes and couple of Sparc machines. Not enough architectures!! I won't be happy until I have one example of every compile target in the Perl makefile :)

Re:Networks Ground to a Halt!

[CthulhuDreamer]

Only one Slashdot would people naturally assume that the term "new rack in my bedroom" involved computer equipment...

Cell is not a "Console Chip"

[ArcherB]

IBM Adds Videogame Console Chips to Mainframes

The Cell is no more a console chip than the x86 (used in XBox) or the PowerPC (used in the 360). Yes, it is used in a console, but I hate to see such a powerful chip "type-cast" to the console. I'm glad IBM is cutting the Cell loose by actually using it for something other than console gaming. However, I wish they would have used a better example than "Virtual Worlds" for its uses. Something like Medical Imaging, 3D Rendering or even Weather Forecasting would have been so much better towards breaking the Cell from its gaming niche.

CELL isn't a video game processor!

[Theovon]

IBM isn't the first or last to come up with the idea behind the CELL processor. With the advent of programmable shaders, the GPU industry was headed that way like a freight train. When people started using these highly pipelined, highly parallel SIMD stream processors that we know as GPUs to do supercomputing, people with a clue took notice and decided that it would be sensible to strip out the video components and generalize the compute engine. However, this kind of compute engine only works well for stream processing, requiring some kind of general-purpose CPU to supervise. And this is exactly what the CELL processor is: A PowerPC supervising the operation of an array of stream processors.

So, while the CELL is inspired by GPU design, I think it would be more appropriate to say that CELL is a supercomputing architecture that, being what it is, is also highly suitable for graphics applications. As such, I think what the slashdot article says is silly. What IBM is doing is putting a supercomputing architecture into a mainframe. This isn't weird. It's sensible and a wise move, technically and competitively.

Re:CELL isn't a video game processor!

[SnowZero]

That's not a particularly accurate characterization. GPUs are very wide, shared memory multiprocessors, while the Cell is a somewhat wide local memory multiprocessor. That is why the Playstation still needs a GPU; The Cell isn't really the best type of processor for current graphics approaches. The Cell design was started quite some time ago (new CPU architectures are not designed overnight), so I don't think it would be accurate to say the Cell is inspired by modern GPU design. Rather, it would be more accurate to say both were inspired by DSPs, which have been used for signal processing tasks for decades.

Also, I don't think I'd use the word "supercomputing" to describe the distributed signal processing for which GPUs are now being used. GPUs won't be used on "real" supercomputers until they decide to implement proper 64-bit IEEE 754 (floating point) support. In that sense, the Cell is more immediately useful for HPC, and along with IBMs presence in that area, you'll see a supercomputer using Cell chips first.

Cool...

[R2.0]

I always wanted to use a pickup truck to bring my rig to a LAN party.

(Actually, that's all bullshit. Don't play games, never been to a LAN party, don't know where to find one. But that's never stopped posting here before.)

Try reading the synopsis

[spun]

That was my first thought too. Then I actually bothered to read the fricken' synopsis and realized that this was IBM's actual spin on it, and they were touting the cell-on-mainframe thing as a server for virtual worlds. It's still kind of a dumb spin, obviously geared for non technical types who may be decision makers on large MMORPG projects. IBM's thinking is probably that they will associate the cell processor with games and therefore feel it would be a good thing to use in running an MMORPG. Which it probably will be, as an MMORPG server is inherently a massively parallel application.

The Cell Isn't a "Game Chip"

[_xeno_]

The Cell has never been intended solely to be a "game chip." It was always intended to be useful in large supercomputer type environments.

The Folding At Home client is an example of a large clustered-based application that uses the Cell as a math processor, as is the recent "real-time raytracing" demo. Both are applications of the Cell in a "mainframe" type environment.

So it's not surprising that IBM would be releasing Cell-based machines - that's been the plan all along. It was never intended just to be used in the PS3.

Any chance this will drive down the manuf. costs?

[Rev Jim (AKA Metal F]

So now that IBM plans to use the same cell processors found in the ps3 what effect will it have on manufacturing costs or even supply issues? Anyone? It sounds like good news for Sony at least PR wise. ANd if it drives costs down, even better news for them.

PCI Card with a Cell

[everphilski]

What I want: a hobbyist card with a Cell chip to do hobbyist things on. There is a company that makes a dual-cell card ... for $8000, 'coming soon'. Anyone know of a cheaper way to get into Cell, besides Playstation?

I would think there would be a healthy market for a 'cell accelerator card', especially in the world I come from (Modeling and Simulation)...

Re:PCI Card with a Cell

[rockmuelle]

The best hobbyist platform is definitely the PS3. Linux runs great on it and HDMI->DVI adaptors let you use it with a DVI monitor (we run them at 1920x1600 on Dell 24" LCDs). As long as PS3s are in the $500-600 price range, there's no real incentive for another low-cost Cell platform. Of course, access to the graphics pipeline is limited, but the SPUs are much easier to program and more flexible than GPUs for general purpose computation.

If you do bite the bullet and go with a PS3, we've developed a Python library -- CorePy -- for programming the SPUs (and PPU) directly. It replaces assembly/intrinsics with Python function calls and provides components for building and optimzing SPU programs. It takes the sting out of using the C-based tools and gives you more flexibility with how you use the SPUs.

-Chris

Mostly for streaming data, not gaming.

[Animats]

IBM has been talking this up for a while. The idea is to offload some "streaming stuff" onto the Cell processors. The phrase "XML acceleration" has been used, which probably means the Cell gets the job of taking some DB2 result and pumping it out in XML. It's also useful for SSL encryption and other related streaming-type tasks.

This is a traditional IBM transaction processing approach. The mainframe is surrounded by lesser machines which handle the communications and formatting, extract the transaction which needs access to the data, ships that to the mainframe, gets a result back, and then formats a reply to the requestor. In the green-screen terminal era, that was done by dedicated hardware. In the web era, too much of that work moved onto the mainframe itself.

Think of this usage of the Cell as offloading the front half of Apache to peripheral processors. When your AJAX app makes an XMLHttpRequest, the idea is that the front-end machines get the request, decode it, wait until it's complete, then pass one single transaction to the mainframe. A single reply comes back, is reformatted as XML, and is shipped out to the client. The number of events processed by the mainframe goes way down, and all the protocol work is offloaded to the low-cost Cell machines with tiny memories.

Has nothing to do with gaming, though. They're not putting the PS3's GPU (from NVidia) on mainframes.

Still only 256KB (not MB) per Cell CPU, though. That's too small. Just cramming the whole protocol stack in there will fill most of the memory. I think this thing will really start to fly when IBM gets up to a 2-4MB per Cell CPU. Then you'll be able to fit the front-end processing for a web server in the Cell. Until then, it's a niche product.

Finally!

[backbyter]

A machine that *might* be able to handle Aero.

Sweeping New Trend

[vux984]

trend sweeping the high-performance computing industry as companies augment general-purpose servers with special-purpose chips to accelerate particular tasks.

As I recall my 286 had a Math Coprocessor.
Years later I bought a hardware MPEG decoder card so that I could watch DVD's without skipping on my old Pentium ii.
And over the last several years I've installed GPU boards to accelerate some particular video rendering tasks.

Its nice to see the idea of special purpose chips for hardware acceleration is finally catching on in high performance computing.

Not a Console Chip

[AikonMGB]

The title is misleading. The Cell processor is not a "console" chip, it is a microprocessor. Period. So what if Sony decided to use the Cell processor in the PS3? They could have selected from any number of processors: AMD64, x86, PPC, Motorola 6800.. whatever!

The Cell processor is and always has been designed for shipping out complex calculations to sub-processing units (I believe their latest term is Synergistic Processing Units [SPUs]?), it was not designed for purpose of Sony bragging about it.

Aikon-

Isn't the processor

[gelfling]

Faster than the PCI bus? Seems like they need another way to plug it into the mainframe.

Where is?

[SnarfQuest]

Where is the "imagine a beowulf cluster os these" comment?

Oh, here it is.

Re:this is irrelevant.

[raftpeople]

the only reason people still use the AS/400 or any other IBM mainframe

An AS/400 is a midrange, not a mainframe. Despite having a large span of scalability, the AS/400 only overlaps the bottom end of the mainframe in performance.

Also, the reasons people buy AS/400's and mainframes are as follows:
Extremely high reliability and security
Performance and scalability
Protection of software investment

justify scrapping for something modern

Do you realize that the AS400 hardware and operating system is more "modern" than Unix? Did you realize that the as400 hardware and operating system have key features that other OS's lack today but most people are moving that direction? Do some research on security and the as400, for example.

the AS/400 or iSeries as it's been renamed, could be replaced in a heartbeat by a LAMP server with an AJAX frontend for 1% of the cost.

Have you ever seen an AS/400 that required even an operator? High end, sure, but small to medium business the controller puts in the backup tape and that's about it. Hardware/software, you're right, but unless you include support salaries then you are comparing apples to oranges, although you could make the exact same argument about Sun/Oracle being more expensive than LAMP.

Marketing Cell Games

[Doc Ruby]

The intent is to allow high-performance machines to run complex online games and virtual worlds.

The intent is to make the high-end Cells (with all 8 SPEs working) cheap by selling millions of PS3s with lower-grade (6 SPEs) Cells, a scale economy that big machines ("mainframes") couldn't achieve on their own.

They're not going to be running "games" like VirtuaFighter on mainframes, especially not without the 9x as fast RSX video chip the PS3 includes. But they will be allowing us to run supercomputer-fast Monte Carlo simulations on PS3 under Linux.

So I guess if their marketdroids keep lying to us about making IBM mainframes into game consoles, it's worth it if they keep delivering the reverse, which is much more interesting.

That's what the world needs, a $1,000,00 console

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the PS3 was over priced at $600.

At last!

[OldManAndTheC]

I can write an RPG in RPG!