On Wednesday 20 September 2006 10:51, Mark Hahn wrote: > > Can anyone point me to a url, or tell me what their > > experience is with this technology? Is it as fast as > > it's purported to be? > > I haven't come anywhere near a Cell, but then again, I'm not sure > I'd want to. 14.6 Gflops (64b, and assuming the full 8 SPE's) > isn't bad, but then again, a 3 GHz Core2 dual-core is 24 Gflops, > and almost certainly a lot more accessible, shipping now, runs linux, > supported by compilers and goto-blas, etc.
Yup, that's an appropriate point of skepticism. We'll have to see what works out in practice. There is a study that says that the Cell has large speedups in real double-precision code, compared to Opteron, Itanium2, and Cray X1E: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~samw/projects/cell/EDGE06_abstract.pdf Related pages: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=+site:www.cs.berkeley.edu+cell+double+precision Also see the following for work on tuning code to use single precision where possible, thus attaining an even bigger speedup: http://icl.cs.utk.edu/iter-ref/ Mercury Computer Systems is designing (and perhaps even shipping pre-production units of) a Cell blade system. IBM is also going to offer Cell blade systems. I am talking to someone who is getting yet an other Cell-based company off the ground, who I believe is aiming for HPC. So there's quite a bit of potential, and I think it's looking pretty likely that we'll see real, affordable Cell-based high-GFLOPS/Watt HPC systems in the coming year, and that these systems will support high performance on double precision code. Right now though, I'm still in wait-and-see mode. David _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
