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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."
> 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.
N-C-C one seven oh one. no bloody A, B, C, or D.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Completely wrong. This is industrial supercomputing, not random web applications. The applications IBM is targetting Cell at are things like seismic analysis for oil companies, and this requires highly tuned implementations and specialised algorithms. This is expensive. It takes a lot of developer hours, and those developers are top-rung, very highly paid, because this stuff is very hard. And it costs a lot in hardware. Unfortunately for IBM, while Cell is fast, it's not fast enough to justify the cost for most companies. And it has a lot of competition from NVIDIA's Tesla platform, AMD/ATI's FireStream, and plain old clusters.