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.
Not everyone needs double precision. And if you do, I would wait
until the next generation Cell processor. My guess is that we will
see it in the near future. The key to winning the Roadrunner proposal
was to get HPL to run at over 1 PF (science be damned). The Cell
isn't going to do that unless either 1) IBM will release a version
that does DP fast or 2) Jack Dongarra is going to accept results for
the Top500 list that perform the double precision correction to single
precision results (see http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/692906.html for
a discussion). The Opteron system being delivered could do the
correction for this technique.
Craig
if you could readily get a 8-16x PCIE card with 2 or more Cell chips and
a bunch of ~50 GB/s local memory, for cheap, it could be quite something.
Apparently RedHat is developing
EL 4.3 to run on the system?
to an OS, it's basically a kinda low-end PPC chip with 8 very weird FP
coprocessors, the latter not relevant to the OS...
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