PS3's Cell Powers Petaflop Supercomputer

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PS3's Cell Powers Petaflop Supercomputer
It seems as though IBM has managed to exploit the true powers of the networking Cell processor, using it along with standard supercomputer processors to achieve a petaflop.
by David Radd on Monday, June 09, 2008


The BBC is reporting that an IBM machine has set a new processing benchmark. Codenamed Roderunner, this super computer has been shown running at petaflop speeds; roughly one thousand trillion calculations per second, making it twice as fast as Blue Gene/L, the current fastest machine also from IBM. Roderunner will be installed at a U.S. government laboratory where it will watch over the U.S. nuclear stockpile and be used in astronomy, genomics and climate change research.

"We are getting closer to simulating the real world," said Bijan Davari, vice president of next generation computing systems at IBM to BBC News. "The latency of the calculations is so small that for all practical purposes it is real time."

Roderunner uses 20,000 processors, which is roughly a tenth the number used in Blue Gene/L, which houses 212,992 processors. Roderunner does this by implementing a hybrid design, which features both regular supercomputer processors and the Cell chip also used in the PS3. The roughly 12,000 Cell processors are used as "accelerators" and go through unstructured data while the roughly 7,000 standard processors handle general computation.

"For these kinds of simulations of very complex natural phenomena the cell chip is extremely powerful," said Dr Davari. "It is a lot more effective than combing many, many, many more smaller, general purpose computational engines."