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

[Mark Hahn]

> Can anyone point me to a url, or tell me what their
> experience is with this technology?  Is it as fast as
> it's purported to be?

I haven't come anywhere near a Cell, but then again, I'm not sure 
I'd want to.  14.6 Gflops (64b, and assuming the full 8 SPE's) 
isn't bad, but then again, a 3 GHz Core2 dual-core is 24 Gflops, 
and almost certainly a lot more accessible, shipping now, runs linux, 
supported by compilers and goto-blas, etc.

if you could readily get a 8-16x PCIE card with 2 or more Cell chips 
and a bunch of ~50 GB/s local memory, for cheap, it could be quite something.

> Apparently RedHat is developing
> EL 4.3 to run on the system?

to an OS, it's basically a kinda low-end PPC chip with 8 very weird 
FP coprocessors, the latter not relevant to the OS...