IBM ups ante in multicore race

By Ed Sperling, Editor in Chief -- Electronic News, 8/29/2007

IBM today will uncork a new multicore blade server powered by the Cell processor—the same processor design that currently drives the Playstation3—making the single most powerful processor on the market available for enterprise computing.

The rollout runs far deeper than just another hardware introduction, however. IBM simultaneously is introducing application development software to take advantage of multiple cores, integrating the processors with middleware that can take advantage of certain aspects of enterprise or mission-critical applications that require a huge boost in horsepower, and making the entire operation far more efficient than existing blade servers.

Focusing in on those aspects of applications that can be parallelized rather than the whole application puts the Cell-powered blades on a radically development different track than the virtualization strategy announced by Intel. Instead of speeding up the whole application, IBM is working with developers to speed up individual pieces of their software. IBM claims it can achieve more efficiency and greater speed through that approach.

IBM claims its new BladeCenter QS21, powered by the Cell Broadband Engine, doubles the memory, density and I/O throughput, and works well with other blade servers made by Intel and AMD. Pamela Richards, director of Cell solutions for IBM, said the new servers will co-exist with x86 servers in the same rack. But she said the real breakthrough is in the software developer kits, which make it far easier to develop applications that take advantage of the chips.

“If something is running on an Intel blade, you may not want to take the entire application and parallelize it,” Richards said. “You may want to just take part of it. We’ve targeted specific areas such as real-time analytics and digital imaging.”

She noted that IBM’s goal is not to create a general-purpose processor. “This is for when you need a lot of good, old-fashioned horsepower. We’ve been working with the Mayo Clinic. Their medical imaging used to take seven hours. Now, with a Cell blade, it takes less than 500 seconds.”

IBM is promoting the new blades as essential in environments where time costs money, such as financial research where seconds can cost millions of dollars, or in computer-generated animation. In many data centers, however, one of the big costs is energy consumption. Power leakage at the chip level creates an enormous amount of heat that has to be removed from data centers. IBM claims the new Cell blades are significantly more efficient, with 14 blades able to do the same work that formerly took 42 blades, based on a 95 percent peak usage with a power consumption of more than 1 gigaflop per watt.

The new machines are based upon a heterogeneous multicore approach. In contrast, Intel has opted for a homogeneous multicore strategy while AMD is focused on heterogeneous. IBM has obtained international licenses for most of the technology, although aerospace and defense applications are country-specific, and not all of the libraries will be licensed in keeping with U.S. trade restrictions.

Whether IBM decides to incorporate similar technology into consumer devices is uncertain—even IBM isn’t sure what it will do. However, the company did just obtain a patent for Java running on multicore chips. All of the new technology will be available in October.