IBM announces Cell-based QS21

Friday 31st August 2007, 08:02:00 PM, written by Carl Bender

IBM announced earlier this week the introduction of the BladeCenter QS21, the newest iteration of the Cell-based QS20 blade server released last year. Featuring several improvements over its predecessor, the QS21 adopts a standard blade form factor - as opposed to the QS20's 2U size - allowing for a doubling of compute density over the previous model to a maximum of fourteen blades per BladeCenter chassis. Additional improvements include I/O considerations such as support for 16 Infiniband lanes and 2GB of buffer memory, in addition to the ability to function as a standalone server outside of a larger cluster.

Simultaneously with the QS21, IBM announced their Multicore Acceleration SDK v3.0. Geared towards application deployment on the Cell BE processor, the new SDK allows application partitioning across hybrid x86/Cell BE systems for task acceleration via use of the included Accelerated Library Framework and Data Communication and Synchronization Library for Hybrid x86 programming models. Tutorials, demo programs, example code, performance analysis and debugging tools are also provided.

Both the BladeCenter QS21 and the Multicore Acceleration SDK 3.0 will become generally available this October.

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