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

[Andrew Shewmaker]

On 10/1/06, Mark Hahn <hahn at physics.mcmaster.ca> wrote:
> > 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.)

Peak double precision performance of Ax=b is 15 GFLOPS on
a 3.2 GHz Cell.

http://icl.cs.utk.edu/iter-ref/custom/index.html?lid=104&slid=210

I can understand why they didn't use doubles in the Sequoia
paper.  DP performance of the architecture is out of their hands
and mentioning it would have distracted from their focus on
programming to the memory hierarchy.

-- 
Andrew Shewmaker