IBM brings HPC to the masses with next-gen Cell processor

Thanks to its PowerXCell 8i processor, which promises five-times the speed of the original Cell/B.E. processor for the most challenging arithmetic operations, IBM is bringing high performance computing to new application areas.

By Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor -- Electronic News, 5/13/2008

With a new Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor at its heart, Big Blue today is aiming to bring high performance computing (HPC) capabilities to all businesses with its BladeCenter QS22 server, following the launch of the QS21 last August.

IBM believes this latest BladeCenter will bring the processing power of supercomputers to industries such as financial services, digital media distribution and medical imaging.

Making that possible is the IBM PowerXCell 8i, which promises five-times the speed of the original Cell/B.E. processor for the most challenging arithmetic operations

The PowerXCell 8i is optimized for parallel processing and streaming applications, and unlike symmetric multi-core, cache-based architectures, it includes a power processor element (PPE) along with eight double precision (eDP) SIMD engines to give performance of about an order of magnitude better than traditional processors for applications that can take advantage of its SIMD capability, IBM explained.

Further, IBM said the QS22 can handle workloads that previously required dozens of servers given that it contains 16 times more memory (up to 32GB) than its predecessors.

IBM said more than 50 companies worldwide are moving “significant” workloads to the QS22 as data centers run out of power and space, while attempting to manage skyrocketing energy and cooling costs.

The QS22 utilizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the primary operating system and the open development environment of Eclipse. For energy efficiency, IBM noted that it increases the performance-per-watt and better manages power draw from the overall server chassis from previous generations, thanks to key built-in features including:

-The IBM power configurator which is meant to help systems managers understand the overall power requirements for operation.
-The IBM systems director active energy manager that helps monitor, control and virtualize the system’s power.
-The IBM rear door heat eXchanger which reduces data center hot spots.
-The IBM data center energy efficiency services which optimize and future-proof a data center for maximum performance.

Also, IBM said thousands of pages of technical documentation are available on the Cell/B.E. Architecture including a full-system simulator. IBM has released an upgrade to its software development kit (SDK) for multicore acceleration v3 that is meant to provide enhancements and templates to facilitate use of the new features of QS22.

Finally, by using the PowerXCell 8i processor, IBM said the QS22 allows IT managers to evaluate how much of an application would need the supercomputing power of the Cell/B.E. architecture and how much could remain on a traditional system, providing the full range of options in the midst of other system priorities.