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Thread: Dedicated Crunching Machines Hardware |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 16
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I have been following some new upgrade hardware for dedicated crunching and found very interesting info as follows:
----------------------------------------Cell Accelerator Board (CAB) http://www.mc.com/cell/products/view/index.cfm?id=106&type=Boards Graphic photo not downloaded The Cell Accelerator Board (CAB) is a PCI Express® accelerator card based on the Cell Broadband Engine™ (BE) processor in a package designed for high-performance environments. This comprehensive user-programmable solution offers order-of-magnitude faster processing for graphics, image, and signal processing workloads. Performance scales dramatically when the application is distributed across multiple Cell Accelerator Boards in a cluster or across the network. Mercury has mapped key algorithms onto the solution, significantly increasing the performance advantages for high-performance computing applications. Features * Cell BE processor at 2.8 GHz * More than 179 GFLOPS in PCI Express accelerator card * PCI Express x16 interface with raw data rate of 4 GB/s in each direction * Gigabit Ethernet interface * 1 GB XDR DRAM * 4 GB DDR2 * Mercury MultiCore Plus™ Advantage software available Windows® XP or Linux In host operation, operates with customer-supplied Windows XP or Linux operating system. Power Cell Accelerator Board with 4 GB DDR2 210W Power is provided through the use of two 75W standard connector cables in addition to the 75W power provided through the PCI Express edge connector. According to the photo the card appears to take up two slots on a Mother Board. Holes in the case mount appear for better airflow in cooling. Mercury is developing a multicomputer chassis that will accept multiple Cell Accelerator Boards connected by a PCI Express fabric. Cell Broadband Engine is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. I have requested price and availability targets (not yet rec'ed 12/27/06). WCGrid-forum-site related URL's: "Here's another 22GHz for the grid!"http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=10211 "CSX600 co-processor"http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/...?thread=2406&offset=0 Off site URL's: Imaging technologies, modalities medical diagnosis, therapy planning, computer assisted surgery: (Lang en) www.imp.uni-erlangen.de By keithhenry Cell Broadband Engine resource center:http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/ IBM, Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba unveil details: http://www.ibm.com/chips/news/2005/0825_cell.html The Cell Project at IBM Research:http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/home.html If anyone finds any other WCG related hardware comments here on site feel free to edit and add here or Add a post. I'll try to keep URL's together here (with edit's, in the starting thread) thank you. [Edit 5 times, last edit by Former Member at Dec 27, 2006 7:35:33 PM] |
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keithhenry
Ace Cruncher Senile old farts of the world ....uh.....uh..... nevermind Joined: Nov 18, 2004 Post Count: 18665 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Ah HA!! I suspected that this might be connected to the Cell chip technology IBM has. Nice to see real products coming from it now!
----------------------------------------Had to do some digging. This seems to be IBM's partnership with Sony and Toshiba and the Cell BE is the chip powering the PS3 I think and is the technology behind the WII as well.. Some related links are: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/ , http://www.ibm.com/chips/news/2005/0825_cell.html and http://www.research.ibm.com/cell/home.html The technonology is beyond my undertanding but it's a CPU and multiple co-processors all on a chip together. I remember when I first heard about this from a friend that it sounded like they were taking multiple components inside a computer and combining them on a single computer chip. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Ah HA!! I suspected that this might be connected to the Cell chip technology IBM has. Nice to see real products coming from it now! ..... Here's an update from the Mercury folks via UK's The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/16/mercury_sc06/ Humble Mercury hurls out more Cell kit By Ashlee Vance .... Moving to Cell systems can also give customers more flexibility. Researchers at Boston University, for example, had been dependent on sharing time on a large cluster. Now, however, part of the Biomedical Engineering group has moved off the cluster and onto a single Cell-based server that's all their own. Beside convenience, the group has seen a dramatic speed up as its jobs now finish in three minutes rather than three weeks. To prove that its Cell pitch is starting to pay off, Mercury plans to announce "two to three big design wins" in the next couple of months. The wins should be for 1,000s of units, Radford said. .... Hope producers see the demand and start lowering prices to commodity levels soon. That'll really open up the doors. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Cell Accelerator Board with 4 GB DDR2 210W ....I have requested price and availability targets (not yet rec'ed 12/27/06). thread=2406&offset=0 CAB boards will be available starting in January 2007 and will sell for $7,999.00. Software is not included. We do offer a Cell Development Workstation System that includes: 1 CAB board, 1 year software and a highend PC workstation for $24,999.00 I could buy a lot of new inexpensive PC machines around $500 a pop for the above prices. In additon one of our members has built a four MotherBoard machine ("Here's another ..." URL above) even cheaper out of spare parts that's doing a great job. For the above deep pocket prices they would have to come to WCG and show some computation stuff before I'd lay down my cash at a quarter of those prices. Of course I'm cheap anyway ;>) PaulT |
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olympic
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jun 12, 2005 Post Count: 156 Status: Offline |
Cutting edge technololgy is always very expensive. If if proves its worthiness and becomes popular, the prices will drop significantly. Anyone remember when CD burners for PC's cost $1000? Now you can buy them for pocket lint...lol!
----------------------------------------Software developers need to get off their duffs and develop more multi-threaded programs and games. The vast majority are still single threaded and can not take advantage of the power provided by multi-core processors. Until that happens, cell technology and 4,8,16 core processors will remain out of the mainstream.  [Edit 1 times, last edit by olympic at Dec 31, 2006 3:15:33 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
.... vast majority are still single threaded and can not take advantage of the power provided by multi-core processors. .... Discussing multi-core and speed for crunchers. Here is some comparative information on current (2006) supercomputers speed posted 31 Dec 06, Quasi-supercomputing, at: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=10802 FYI PaulT |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Yellow Dog Linux 5 (YDL5) has adopted the Play Station 3(PS3).
Cutting edge technololgy is always very expensive. If if proves its worthiness and becomes popular, the prices will drop significantly. .... Linux comes to the Cell Processer via PS3Terra Soft company, with Mercury Computers, who had developed specialized gene sequence software for the PPC, is now using Enlightenment window manager for working with the PS3 (Issue 90, Mar 07, p.52 www.linuxformat.co.uk ). This is an oficially supported PS3 hardware platform. Terra Soft will preinstall YDL5 on a PS3 and is taking advance orders for the package on their web site for about $650. One note, I believe that the cell processor in the PS3 has been crippled but not sure. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Yellow Dog + RapidMind use the SPE's on the Cell: http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/news/2007/2007-01-23.shtml
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
It's kinda humbling, and humorous...
All this good, indeed most of the continuing revolutions in the "silicon spice" world is spurred on by the gamers. The real unsung heroes... |
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keithhenry
Ace Cruncher Senile old farts of the world ....uh.....uh..... nevermind Joined: Nov 18, 2004 Post Count: 18665 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Gamers and the military actually. Lots of the same technology that gamers drool over are perfect for better training in the miltary too. Now if the Dark Lord had paid attention to security from the beginning, we wouldn't have the issues with hackers like we do but I guess there's more attention to that now than otherwise as a result. Compost happens.
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