[Beowulf] Has anyone actually seen/used a cell system?

[Mark Hahn]

> They have a paper that explains it well and has some
> interesting benchmarks.
>
> http://sc06.supercomputing.org/schedule/pdf/pap225.pdf

this is quite interesting.  I wish they had done benchmarks with doubles,
especially since they alluded to, for instance, the n-body calculation 
really needing at least careful consideration of precision/resolution.
(now that I think of it, using 23 bits of mantisas on a 256^3 FFT 
sounds numerically dubious too.)

interesting that for a 2.4GHz Cell, they get at most 10 FP Gflops per SPE.
does anyone have SGEMM numbers for a 3GHz Intel Core2?  I'll guess that
efficiency of libgoto with 2 threads would be >= 80%, so flops would be 
.8*2*8*3 =~ 40 Gflops, or half a Cell chip. 
makes it hard to argue for wide use of Cell, I think...