Cell BE Center Planned for Georgia Tech

By Colleen Taylor -- Electronic News, 11/20/2006

The College of Computing at Georgia Tech has been designated the first Sony-Toshiba-IBM (STI) "center of competence" focused on the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) microprocessor.

In doing so, IBM Corp., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. have partnered with the College of Computing at Georgia Tech to build a community of programmers and broaden industry support for the Cell BE processor. The trio of companies have made a donation to the school to foster the center, but have not released the specific financial details of that award.

The Cell BE processor's design features a central processing core, based on Big Blue's power architecture technology, and eight synergistic processors. According to the companies, Cell BE "supercharges" compute-intensive applications, offering fast performance for a host of computing environments. The Cell BE processor appears in Sony's new PlayStation 3 gaming system, which made its debut in North American stores last week amid much fanfare.

"The College of Computing at Georgia Tech firmly believes that the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Cell BE processor represents the future of computing using heterogeneous multi-core processors, and we are pleased to work with three leading technology companies in a broad collaboration that will demonstrate the extreme performance of Cell," David A. Bader, associate professor and executive director of high-performance computing at Georgia Tech, said in a statement.

Georgia Tech's new center will sponsor discussion forums and workshops, provide remote access to Cell blade hardware installed at Georgia Tech, create and disseminate software optimized for Cell BE systems, and perform research on the design of Cell BE systems, algorithms and applications.

The award from Sony-Toshiba-IBM will support the center's activities and research efforts in an effort to disseminate Cell BE's impact into multiple sectors and industries, including scientific computing, digital content creation, bioinformatics, finance, gaming and entertainment.

"We are looking forward to seeing a paradigm shift in computing, and anticipate that our collaboration with the College of Computing at Georgia Tech will create innovative applications for Cell processors," said Masa Chatani, CTO of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., said in the statement. "We expect that it will generate tremendous value not limited to PlayStation 3, but to all Cell-based computers."

Cell BE's developers have been making pushes for the technology both in the United States and abroad in recent months. In October, a group of high-tech European companies, backed by EU funding, is announced plans to pursue parallel processing for the consumer world using Cell BE.