[Beowulf] more news on the Cell

[Karsten Petersen]

Hi

Eugen Leitl wrote:
> http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-cell/?ca=dgr-pow03SpufsCell
> 
> also, see http://www.research.scea.com/research/html/CellGDC05/index.html

Regarding the cell:  I think it was pretty demonstrative by IBM to show 
the cell chip at Linuxtag2005 but not at ISC2005 (although IBM was the 
main sponsor and even had a BlueGene box there).  Asked about this, the 
IBM guys conceded that they do not really see the cell chip within the 
HPC market.

Some participants at ISC also discussed if it will be possible to port 
e.g. blas/lapack to the cell architecture and in what amount it will be 
able to do double precision float operations.  (It seems to be optimized 
for single precision!)

BTW:  When it comes to raw numbercrunching power, the ClearSpeed 
coprocessor card looks promising, too.

Best wishes
Karsten
-- 
HPC System Engineer
MEGWARE Computer GmbH
http://www.megware.com