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IBM Touts Supercomputers for Enterprise
Stony Stevenson writes "IBM has announced an initiative to offer smaller versions of its high-performance computers to enterprise customers. The first new machine is a QS22 BladeCenter server powered by a Cell processor. Developed to power gaming systems, the Cell chip has also garnered interest from the supercomputing community owing to its ability to handle large amounts of floating point calculations. IBM hopes that the chips, which currently power climate modeling and other traditional supercomputing tasks, will also appeal to customers ranging from financial analysis firms to animation studios."
If specialized hardware returns to vogue, then there problems will crop up with the new specialized hardware. Dude face it, if you are a sysadmin, God will provide you with your share of things to complain about. It is the natural working order of things.
I got a catholic block.
> Personally, I'm sick of managing farms of
> physical servers, and with the introduction of
> VMWare, I'm now managing 3x the number of
> machines (albeit virtual machines).
All those Virtual machines to do the same thing with 4 times the resources as one well configured Linux box. Tsk Tsk.
Oh, but don't you LOOK busy.....
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
A coprocessor for what? You do realize that each Cell already has 8 SPEs attached to it, and it's designed to be tightly paired with another Cell? It already delivers kind of ridiculous bang for the buck, so I'm curious what you're asking for.
(Usual disclaimer: I'm in the IBM food chain, but I don't speak for anyone and I don't know anything.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Speaking as someone who architects, implements and maintains systems for animation studios, the sorts of dollars IBM ask for *anything* means they'll never appeal to animation studios.
There's only one Pixar and there's only one ILM. The other million animation studios out there don't have budgets even close to these guys, particularly considering the turn around on hardware (today's super cluster is tomorrow's pile of junk). Renderfarms will be staying with cheaper vendors (which also means white box for most) for some time to come yet.
If IBM want to appeal to that lot, they're going to have to knock a few zeros off the end of their quotes.
> Have an FTP server? Run that in it's own image. Also have a syslog server? Yet another virtual machine.
Which as you have no doubt discovered, are sort of a PITA to administer because they're all in separate VMs. I suspect the next big thing in commodity server virtualization will be nice management interfaces and protocols that break down some of the management walls between VMs, while still leaving the more important parts of the virtual environment intact. And being able to change the hardware assigned to a VM on the fly will probably become more common, too. I'd give it 5 or 6 more years, and VMWare will probably have managed to reinvent the LPAR.
Gotta love how this stuff goes around in cycles. Anything cool today in microcomputers was probably boring people to tears 10 or 15 years ago on large systems. (Cf. multitasking, multiple users, parallel processing, network-oriented filesystems, virtualization, hypervisors...)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's only completely wrong if we assume the story is a non-story. The markets you're talking about are traditional super-computer markets. The summary at least (too tired to read the full story today) is suggesting that IBM is targeting "Enterprise" customers. Which, by the classic definition of who those customers are, means that a lot of folks are going to be asking, "Where's the 0xDEADBE... Err.... Java?!?!"
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Ya know thats a pci requirement, right?
Sorry, but I think you're off on a pretty wild tangent as to what the Cell processor is really about... However, I don't feel that I'm in a position to do more than to refer you to the publicly available documentation. There's quite a bit available about the architecture of the Cell and the interfaces to external processors and resources.
/. reader was born. Seems to be a relatively young crowd around here.
In some ways it might help to think about the Cell in comparison with a CDC 6600--but they probably stopped production on those before the average
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Of course it's for enterprise...
because you and I can't afford a $10k blade let alone the rack slot farm to put it in.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/qs22/index.html
(browse and buy)
The updates to it, DDR2 and better floating point, those are nice.
Now if they would make a small system, somewhere between a mini-mac and a shuttle pc in size,
DVD/RW, 2 Gb lan ports, some usb, basic video, 2 or 4 gigs ram (or empty memory slots we could fill ourselves) and a place for a SATA drive
not using it as a co-pro, but as the main CPU, with a linux install disk and the SDK,
compare my imagined specs with the PS3 crippled cell (7 out of 8 working, and 1 of them against you for system security).
If it were in the same price range, that'd be nice, maybe a way to get more people to experiment/develop for it.
Your post could have been much shorter if you wrote it this way: "This will fail because there are tradeoffs for using it. I know this because I'm in college and other college kids said it was hard to use. I tried to come up with an idea, but there are those darned tradeoffs again. No tool that has ever succeeded has had tradeoffs or was hard to use."
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
What a rambling bunch of nonsense. While the 'negatives' you post are true, they in no way make the design a failure.
The chip was not designed to replace any type of general purpose processor in the Enterprise space. Cell is a large parallel FP number cruncher. So, no, databases or file servers and other solution that basically involves moves data around between storage and the network, is not a good fit.
Real time Video/Audio transcoding and distribution on the other hand, if needed in an Enterprise shop somewhere, would be a perfect fit, if done correctly.
The PPU is *not* a POWER5, and while DMA transfers do have inherent latency, it is not really a problem at all. Especially, if you schedule your DMAs correctly, you can almost completely recover the latency times. Message sending from PPU and SPU has no latency (their on the same chip!).
All your bitching about difficulty in programming, are grounded in fact, but compare these techniques to programming in Cuda or writing fake Opengl programs in order to take advantage of a GPUs floating point power and you'll realize that while Cell is difficult, at least it will run straight C - even on the SPUs - and you can optimize from there however much you want.
You seem misinformed.
FUNK!