Re: Roadrunner Supercomputer using 12,960 CELL Processors Hits 1

On Jun 11, 7:32 am, Air Raid <AirRaid...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Jun 11, 4:32 am, already5cho...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
>
> > On the positive note, successful testing of the Roadrunner means that
> > IBM has the ability to manufacture a new variant  of Cell with fully-
> > pipelined double-precision FPU in production quantity.
> > IBM web site indicates that a new engine is available to mere
mortals:http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/qs22/index...
>
> Interesting thing about the IBM PowerXCell 8i   Processor is that it
> offers 4 to 5 (IBM says 5)  times the double precision FP performance
> of the original Cell Processor.
>
> Depending on various factors such as having 7 or 8 SPEs active,
> counting the PPE or not counting it, and clockspeed, the original CELL
> could manage 218 to 256 to just under 300 GFLOPs of single precision
> FP.  When double precision is needed performance drops massively, down
> to around 25 GFLOPs.
>
> The  IBM PowerXCell 8i is said to be capable of over 100 GFLOPs
> double precision.  That's a huge increase without adding more SPEs or
> upping clockspeed.
>
>  PowerXCell 8i  cannot be considered a next-generation CELL,  only an
> enhanced first-gen CELL.
>
> IBM plans to put 32 SPEs on the next-gen CELL to hit 1 TFLOP (single
> precision I would imagine) in a single chip by 2010.  There was also
> an official roadmap that showed  a CELL with 64 SPEs  on a process
> smaller than 45nm (be it 32nm, 22nm, I don't know).   I posted about
> both in the past.
>
> It's clear that the IBM-To****ba-Sony CELL is proving to be much more
> useful beyond  PS3 than the Sony-To****ba 'Emotion Engine' ever was,
> which really had no use outside of PS2 and cheap, home-made university
> "supercomputers' such as the one using 60 or 70 PS2s at UIC in IL.
>
> Roadrunner is serious stuff, and it's only the beginning. In the next
> decade we'll see more powerful supercomputers using next-gen CELLs.

Though the CELL may prove more useful, it still has some serious arch
issues that a lot of people don't like. Programming the thing is not
the easiest thing in the world to do (though parallel programming
models for CMPs are somewhat of an open issue). It's nice that they
will continue to push performance, but many GPUs will be well above
1TFLOPS SPFP by 2010... which means that obviously Larrabee will be
out then. While I'm glad that CELL came out as it's enlightened the
world and solved several of the multicore integration problems, it
simply doesn't seem like the chip of the future right now. I simply
haven't heard a whole lot of interest from the HPC community on CELL,
but you never know... I could be wrong.