Tuesday, 3 October 2006

IBM Makes First Cell Computer Generally Available

IBM has announced that it is making its first computing system based on the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) with early adopters such as University of Manchester, RapidMind, and Fraunhofer Institute deploying compute-intensive applications on early ship versions.

The IBM BladeCenter QS20 is a Cell BE-based blade system designed for businesses that can benefit from the computing power and the capabilities of the Cell BE processor to run graphic-intensive applications. The IBM BladeCenter QS20 will expand the use of Cell into industries such as medical imaging, aerospace, defence, digital animation, communications and oil and gas – with the ability to dramatically transform those industries.

Based on the Power Architecture, the Cell BE was originally developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba for use in gaming consoles. Cell BE’s multi-core architecture and communications capabilities is said to deliver real-time response effectively by incorporating IBM’s multi-processing technologies usually reserved for the company’s servers.

Beta versions of the IBM BladeCenter QS20 are already in use at customer sites across the US, as well as in the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, Japan and Korea.

The IBM BladeCenter QS20 system will rely on the Cell BE processor to accelerate computationally intense workloads associated other specific industry needs, such as 3D animation rendering, compression, and encryption, and seismic and medical imaging to help companies create and run visual and real-time applications.

Specific examples include:

• Medical industry
• Aerospace & defence industry
• Oil and gas industry