IBM chooses Cell to power new supercomputing centre at UMBC
Monday 27th August 2007, 06:06:00 PM, written by Farid
IBM and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) jointly announced the other day the creation of The Multicore Computing Center (MCC), a new supercomputing research facility, which should be operational by fall 2007. The research laboratory’s clusters will be powered by the Cell processor, the CPU co-developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM (STI).
The Multicore Computing Center’s goal is to conduct supercomputing research in the fields related to aerospace, defence, financial computing, medical imaging and weather prediction. In other words, it plans to study most of the fields that require High Performance Computing (HPC).
This endeavour, of creating Cell-based clusters, has been compared to an orchestra by Milt Halem, director of the MCC and professor of computer science at UMBC, who said that the challenge lies in “choreographing all the chips to work efficiently in parallel. It's like a distributed orchestra with 224 musicians and 28 conductors connected with head phones trying to play Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 together." Interestingly, this musical analogy reveals us that this cluster should be made of 28 Cell processors.
It is not the first time that the Cell processor, a CPU created principally to be used in Sony’s PlayStation 3, finds its way into an HPC cluster. The CPU famous for its SPEs has already been chosen by the U.S.’ National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to be part of the giant mainframe “Roadrunner,†which comprised of AMD’s Opteron processors and Cell processors. “Roadrunner†is currently deployed at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos facility and should be operational during 2008.
The Cell used in the MCC’s cluster should be the HPC-targeted revision of the Cell Broadband Engine processor, revealed at Cool Chips X earlier this year. For more information on this version of Cell, take a look at our entry detailing the main changes made to the processor.
The Multicore Computing Center’s goal is to conduct supercomputing research in the fields related to aerospace, defence, financial computing, medical imaging and weather prediction. In other words, it plans to study most of the fields that require High Performance Computing (HPC).
This endeavour, of creating Cell-based clusters, has been compared to an orchestra by Milt Halem, director of the MCC and professor of computer science at UMBC, who said that the challenge lies in “choreographing all the chips to work efficiently in parallel. It's like a distributed orchestra with 224 musicians and 28 conductors connected with head phones trying to play Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 together." Interestingly, this musical analogy reveals us that this cluster should be made of 28 Cell processors.
It is not the first time that the Cell processor, a CPU created principally to be used in Sony’s PlayStation 3, finds its way into an HPC cluster. The CPU famous for its SPEs has already been chosen by the U.S.’ National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to be part of the giant mainframe “Roadrunner,†which comprised of AMD’s Opteron processors and Cell processors. “Roadrunner†is currently deployed at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos facility and should be operational during 2008.
The Cell used in the MCC’s cluster should be the HPC-targeted revision of the Cell Broadband Engine processor, revealed at Cool Chips X earlier this year. For more information on this version of Cell, take a look at our entry detailing the main changes made to the processor.
Tagging
cpu ± ibm, cell
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