Posted on 08/02/2006 5:05:45 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Mercury Computer is sampling a PCI-Express add-in card powered by a Cell processor running Yellow Dog Linux. The Cell Accelerator Board (CAB) targets rendering, ray tracing, video/image processing, and signal processing applications, and is said to deliver 180 GFLOPS (billion floating-point operations per second).
(Click for larger view of Mercury CAB)
Mercury claims the CAB will be the first Cell-based system for the "workstation" market, when it ships early next year. Mercury also claims to have shipped the first Cell-based computer in general, a 470 pound blade chassis that shipped in January.
The CAB runs a Yellow Dog Linux BSP (board support package) developed by Terra Systems. It can be used with Mercury's Multicore Plus Advantage middleware, said to abstract hardware capabilities and distribute data processing across multiple computing elements, such as the eight "synergistic" vector processing units found in Cell processors.
Cell is a relatively new chip that weds a PowerPC control processor with eight vector-processing units variously called SPUs or SPEs ("synergistic processing units/engines"). The chip was co-developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, and will be used in Sony's Playstation 3.
Availability
A limited number of CAB "prototypes" are available now, with general availability scheduled for Q1, 2007. The CAB will be priced upwards of $8,000, with volume discounts available.
A super computer for your PC....well sort of!
A big reason this thing costs so much is because the target market for these things, at least out the gate, is defense contractors for signal processing related work.
That why they cost so much.
It's about time someone came out with a PCI Express card that wasn't just for gamers.
Yes, wonder what all is under that black cover.....?
Nothing special other than the CPU, RAM, FLASH, and maybe some custom ASICs. It is just used to direct the air from the fan - that way they can be sure the system will have the correct amount of cooling.
The Mercury Cell Accelerator Board features a 2.8GHz Cell processor, 1GB of Rambus XDR DRAM, 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM, Gigabit Ethernet, and a PCI Express x16 interface. Rated power draw is a whopping 210W, and the card is 12.283" long—about an inch shorter than NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card. Expect the Cell Accelerator Board to become available in early 2007 at a price of $7,999.
PCI Express SCSI, LAN, FC, SATA RAID cards have all been available for quite some time.
I was kidding, but I would appreciate being pointed to a good RAID card, one with onboard RAID that doesn't require special drivers. I'm used to Adaptec cards that are transparent to the OS.
However, I know people developing commercial applications for Cell, and it appears to be a major pain. You both have to direct instructions to go into those "Special Processing" units it has, and the PowerPC inside of it can't handle out-of-order instructions, leading to major coding headaches.
http://www.cotsjournalonline.com/home/article.php?id=100412
"Designed for next-gen digital media apps, the Cell processor has hooked interest among image processing designers for automatic target recognition and related apps."
"With its high performance per watt, the Cell BE processor can address the portable, weight-sensitive and airborne applications (portable ultrasound, unmanned surveillance, military identification and targeting). Automatic target recognition (ATR), time-sensitive targeting, network-centric warfare, and real-time continual surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) are all enhanced with the faster image processing the Cell BE processor delivers.
The ATR algorithm, used for classifying radar images (tank or track vehicle), includes as many as 140 different threat models running on a system with 64 processors. Other defense algorithms use up to 480 processors. The Cell BE processor can dramatically reduce the size of these systems by providing greater density. For network-centric warfare (NCW), the Cell BE processor offers accelerated delivery of time-critical information to the warfighter to enable accurate and timely decisions."
All information is from non-classified sources.
Thanks!
PCI express card availability really bites! LOL!!!
Wish more cards used that bus. Sigh.
:-)
Check this out!
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/10/project_keifer_32_core/
Things are getting very interesting....so which one will the
application programmers go for?
Nice list of applications you presented. That is precisely why I commented to Ernest as I did. Hardware just seemed to match the type applications you listed.
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