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."

Comments

Re:The trend towards commodity hardware continues.

[explosivejared]

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.

Re:The trend towards commodity hardware continues.

[icebike]

> 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.....