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

The trend towards commodity hardware continues...

[HockeyPuck]

I've seen more than my share of traditionally big iron applicatoins (databases, data warehousing etc..) being moved off of specialized hardware (ibm p595s, sun e15k, HPSuperdomes etc..) being moved onto (or attempted to) commodity hardware. Management hears,

"We can replace that $2m server with 10racks of servers each $1k and after 3yrs we just throw them away and replace them with the latest and greatest x86 based hardware with 2x performance still $1k/server? Now IBM wants to push highly specialized blades. Somewhere someone's saying, "How many x86 servers can we get for one Cell blade?"

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). Have an FTP server? Run that in it's own image. Also have a syslog server? Yet another virtual machine. I really hope this sells well. Maybe I can now play PS3 games in the datacenter.

Yes, It Does Run Linux

[Doc Ruby]

From IBM's detailed press release:

the QS22 boasts an open environment, utilizing the flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the primary operating system and the open development environment of Eclipse.

That means that a PS3 running Linux, even with its ridiculously low 512MB RAM, can be used as a $500 development platform for these CellBE BladeServers.

And, in turn, some QS22 SW might be usable on the PS3, if it can be ported to use the tiny RAM. Or if someone hooks an i-RAM bank to the SATA port as swap/ramdisk, using perhaps iSCSI over its Gb-e for storage.