Cell-based Server Blade Demonstrated

slashflood writes "Only a few clients in a hotel room near Los Angeles had the chance to see the first Cell based server blade running Linux 2.6.11. 'We demonstrated the prototype to show that Cell continues to mature. The product is expected to have several times higher performance compared to conventional servers,' said an IBM engineer."

Great

Now we'll have to put up with people's web servers ringing in movie theaters.

Is an IBM response about Apple isue?

Or to say, "hey, powerpc is not only for games"

huh?

Only a few clients in a hotel room near Los Angeles had the chance to see the first Cell based server blade running Linux 2.6.11.

sounds like a drug deal going down.

Now we just need to ask it tough questions!

Maybe we'll get better answers than "42".

I wonder if anyone knows how close we are to the power of the human brain yet.

Re:Now we just need to ask it tough questions!

42.0

Got to use the floating point power.

Re:Now we just need to ask it tough questions!

41.999987448205

Intel Inside (the warning, NOT the logo!~)

Re:Now we just need to ask it tough questions!

Comparing MFLOPS to intelligence comes from the same school that promised that true AI is "just around the corner" for 30 years.

The mind might indeed be a Turing machine, but it's a very different architecture and OS than the ones we know about.

IBM should seed Cell Processors to Linux clubs...

...all across the country so they could all develop software autonomously.

They could call the program "Cellular Automata."

probably only running on the central powercore

Though it is very nice to see that IBM ported linux this quickly, I think they cut some corners. The cell has a central powerpc core, and 8 (or more) accesory processing units. The processing power lies in these APU's, not in the central power core. The APU are also very specialised, so you will ot only have to allow acces to the cell from the OS(and manage those), but you also have to write the userland programs that take advantage of the APU's strong points.
That applies to every program you want to use the apus, so the chance that this happens overnight/soon is pretty slim. Heck, they might even need to rewrite the benchmark programs for it.

Because they have not released any real benchmarks and only talk about theoretical numbers, i think they have not finished the porting fully (or have very disappointing benchmark numbers).

Giving early acces to LUGs would be nice for the street creds, but will not speed the code development of the mostly proprietary code that needs to run on it. Giving it to Gimp/Blender/other developers might work, if it comes with a crash course cell programming.

I don't get it

The Cell is just a PPC with 8 little miniprocessors tacked on. The miniprocessors have explicit control over and direct access to the contents of their own cache, but can only access data in awkward ways; and are super-optimized for vector/SIMD instructions and floating point operations, but are not so good at algorithmic or complex flow operations.

The Cell's bonus processors are absolutely great for DSP and multimedia apps, such as that we see in the Cell.

But, they are going to be at a strict disadvantage in data retrieval and pushing operations-- which is, incidentally, exactly what most servers, such as a file, web or database server, need to be best at!

What kind of servers *ARE* these??

Re:I don't get it

Unless you buy into the whole "utility computing" paradigm, like IBM does. In that case, servers are going to be doing more than just handing up files and indexing databases.

Using a two-tier or three-tier approach to client/server architecture, with something like a full-duplex GigE connection to fat, diskless clients and you have some real potential.

A fat client (512+ Mb RAM, 1 CELL processor) that can use the backend for the more heavy-lifting tasks would be a fantastic setup for a lot of businesses.

-Charles

Re:I don't get it

Sorry, but it really wouldn't. Think about it.

If you're running a rendering farm, then the Cell is a great tool. (And, if you think about it, a game console is essentially a low end rendering farm.) If you're running a word processor, however, SIMD instructions are useless. If you're performing a standard query against a database, SIMD instructions are useless. If you're sending an electronic mail, hey, guess what? SIMD instructions are useless.

I think that IBM Microelectronics is trying to Cell their new processor in the hopes of Celling their bosses on the (dubious) proposition that they can recoup the losses they've seen on their contract with Sony. They've packaged up the right buzzwords, and they're creating a lot of fog. I sort of doubt that it will work.

Re:I don't get it

If you're running a word processor, a 3.2ghz processor is a bit useless too don't you think?

Re:I don't get it

Hey, I frequently run a word processor on my rack of blade servers you insensitive clod! I'm hoping clippy will be self aware soon...

Re:I don't get it

Yeah, but most "normal" apps like e-mail, word processing, web browsing, etc. are more than handled by the base processor. No, you don't get any help by the SIMD but you don't need it.

When you move to things like editing audio & video, print rasterizing, hi-res photo deforms and filters, then it'll kick in.

Think of what this sort of processing will do to GIMP/Photoshop filter speed... Or DVD/music ripping/encoding/decoding... Or audio mixing...

Now, if we can only get hold of the distro...

PS3Linux awaits!

The Cell concept is really cool

These things work fine alone, but when connected together they really shine. Built-in clustering hardware interfaces makes this a nerd's wet dream.

Putting them together into a rackable case looks to be very cool and finally putting a nail in the Windows coffin will be a delicious treat for IBM (the Cell ain't x86).

I can't wait to get my hands on my PS3 and see what I can do.

In the meantime, I just wish IBM had Cell samples available for a reasonable price. I just can't afford one for hacking yet!

That's odd...

"We demonstrated the prototype to show that Cell continues to mature..."

...I thought Gohan killed Cell?

Very promising technology= investment opportunity?

Guess it is time to invest in Sony and IBM! This technology really looks promising, especially when you read this article --> http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell5.htm l [blachford.info]
The first Cell based desktop computer will be the fastest desktop computer in the industry by a very large margin. Even high end multi-core x86s will not get close. Companies who produce microprocessors or DSPs are going to have a very hard time fighting the power a Cell will deliver. We have never seen a leap in performance like this before and I don't expect we'll ever see one again, It'll send shock-waves through the entire industry and we'll see big changes as a result.

Re:Very promising technology= investment opportuni

After you've read Blatchford's write-up, read this for a reality check:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050124-4551 .html [arstechnica.com]

It uses such terms as 'hogwash' and 'wild-eyed and completely unsubstantiated claims'. Ouch.

correct me if i'm wrong....

Wast the benefit with Cell supposed to be that the programmable DSP's worked somewhat like pixel shaders except useful for all kinds of complex serial data so that operations on serial data could be massively improved, which does not seem to me like it would be a major help in a server, unless it is running a specialized app that just happens to be on a server for data access rather than using the Cell to speed up web servers etc.

Re:correct me if i'm wrong....

I think its because web servers have thread pools, so a cell processor could handle many of these light-weight threads simultaniously. This makes it perfect for a blade server.

Sun's Niagara is aimed at this market, where the work is of great quanitity, not huge number crunching. This could mean searching, web page serving, and streaming media. So if you need to handle thousands of requests, this type of processor is ideal. Of course we won't truly know until one of these massively multicore beasts is out in the wild and can be tested in a realistic scenario.

Interesting quote from the article

"If operated at 3 GHz, Cell's theoretical performance reaches about 200 GFLOPS, which works out to about 400 GFLOPS per board"

From TFA. Interesting, considering that they're claiming that the PS3 will run 5-10 faster than this.

Re:Interesting quote from the article

Sony's 2TFlops number for the PS3 includes the NVidia graphics chip, which has an insanely high FLOPS count but isn't really useful for general-purpose computation.

I'm just curious

Ok, so the way I see it, we have invented a lot of ways to increase our MIPS and our processing power.. something along the lines of this->

1) Single CPU
2) Multiple CPU
3) Multiple Machines in a grid with single CPUs
4) Multiple Machines in a grid with multiple CPUs
5) Multiple grids with many machines
6) Multiple cores in a single CPU
7) Multiple cores in multiple CPUs
7) Multiple cores in multiple CPUs in a grid
8) ..what next?

We also went from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to now 64-bit and beyond. 64-bit words.. nice! Of course, more parallelism means more threads for more simultaneous processes, and 64-bit means twice as much "word" space than 32-bit, but what next?

It's truly mind boggling, and it's a great time to be in IS/IT!

What I want to know is, how much further? How can we increase the multiples more? For example, what happened to quantum processing and multiple states for a bit instead of 0 and 1? When can I count my bits 0, 1 and .5? Any supercomputer geeks care to postulate?

Re:I'm just curious

'factoring prime numbers'?

You mean deriving the factors of products of primes, right?

OS X on Cell?

Imagine OS X on cell... with the collusion between Apple and IBM, and OS X running on open hardware... This could be the killer OS that supplants windows.

Linux wont do it (not in the desktop arena, it does kick ass in the server area though) but OS X could very well.

That would be something to see, and I would bet, that much software that was OS X capable on Cell would ALSO be Linux capable (perhaps a recompile by the vendor? maybe native... not certan here.)

Would be nice to have a stable easy to use OS as the dominant platform. Of course, the irony would be that if this did become the case, then I suppose that Apple would eventually become as lazy and as dominant as Microsoft.

*sigh*

Still, nice to dream!

Re:OS X on Cell?

There are several contexts which can lead to Cell processor being used in future Apple platforms:

• As a media co-processor in next generation PowerMacs, and potentially even high end iMacs, similar to "AV" badged Macs from a few years back. Cell can work as a pretty good general purpose media co-processor to offload video encode/decode operations from the main processor(s). Even the current high end dual processor PowerMacs are being challenged when decoding HD H.264. A co-processor that can enable real-time H.264 encoding would make a big impact on the user perception.
• As a physics modelling co-processor for Macs to accelerate animation and games. This is really what the Cell processor is designed for in the first place, and there is likely to be plenty of libraries/engines written for PS3. This will go a long way to eliminate the existing perception that Macs are inferior game machines. The same capabilities can be used by professionals for 3D animation work.
• As the core of a home media center that can encode/decode/store/stream video/audio. If the Cell can fit the thermal and cost constraints of a game console, it would also be a good fit for a next generation media center.

Re:OS X on Cell?

anyone here who's ever worked on Final Cut, After Effects, Motion, Logic, Shake, or Maya or any number of hundreds of applications that often require seconds to HOURS of rendering can imagine Cell processors in their Macs, you collective morons that say stupid things like "why do you need a DSP processor to make file serving go faster"?

Some of us in content creation could use a little help here...

That some people are stumped by the utility of using Cell processors in Apple-built blade servers to take the place of XServes, or for what purpose would there be in 1-4 Cells in the Mac of the average Joe makes me really doubt the usefullness of our public schools.

Power users being able to add 15 animation effects with translucency and kenetics in Motion to a video with 8 layers of HD video and then watch it automatically copy straight to a DVD-R - without rendering time - makes us wet with anticipation...

and wondering when the hell hard drives are going to be able to catch up.

I would easily give up my right nut for a Apple-based blade server now that the Pro apps are starting to use XGrid for co-processing the heavy lifting portions of our work. My DVD projects of 2 hours still take long over an hour to render 2-pass MPEG2 on a high end DP G5. Multiples faster than realtime, could the Cell do.

But the average Joe? Why does Safari have to use a 8 core DSP? its doesn't, dumbass. But that's not all people do with their macs...

That iDVD render? What render? The lag is now your DVD burner - 100%.

Encoding settings for your iPod, vs. encoding settings for your files. iTunes could EASILY convert - on the fly - Apple Lossless encoded files to some kind of smaller, lossy codec as it filled your iPod. No waiting except for your iPod's slow-ass hard drive.

all this - while the Cell is still using a basic G5 at its core... so, no, Word isn't going to get any punch - but if Cell processors are as cheap as G5's, then what the hell is the issue here?

I'm damn ready for radical leaps in DSP... i'm fscking sick and tired of watching progress bars, DAMNIT! and if the Cell can do everything IBM says it can - hell, yeah, bring it on.

Server guys - try to think beyond your damn file services.

! Graphics only

I've been trying to ignore everybody's outspoken assumptions about the Cell being a graphics chip which can't do general processing for a desktop computer. The fact is that it's rightly a multi-core chip with loads of vector processing capacity. It might not be as fast on a single-threaded task, but the software world is going to adapt quickly for this type of setup because it's where the hardware is going. No semiconductor lab can (cost) effectively compete in a megahertz race anymore, so more power = more transistors (more cores).

Server programs are ahead of the curve at this point because they've had multiple CPUs in abundance for a long time. However, even today it doesn't make sense for games like Doom III to avoid taking advantage of this hardware when possible (for instance, the G4/G5 systems have had dual processors for YEARS but Id won't use them properly). For petessake, calculate audio on one processor and AI on the other...

Carmack has tried...

Carmack explored threading the Quake3 engine pretty thoroughly [doom-ed.com] - and concluded that it really didn't help much, due to the nature of the problem - high-bandwidth communication between threads.

Some types of computing problems (e.g the compositing app I work on) multithread very well, and some just don't.

It's possible Q3A might thread better on a Cell, due to high bandwidth between SPEs - but then again, he was using a the second thread for vertex processing, which is done by the GPU these days anyway.

IBM Blade Server Management

This won't go anywhere if IBM doesn't clean up its blade management console.

I've been doing extensive research on blade servers recently for my company, and when it comes down to it, IBM's centralized management for blade servers is hands down the worst in the industry. RLX used to be the best, but they're out of the business now. HP was #2, now they're the leader. Egenera is doing some really cool things, but their setup is just way too expensive (almost 5 times the price of the other leading blade systems).

So, even if these cell blades were to be the coolest thing ever, if IBM doesn't make an investment into improving their management software, no one's going to buy these things unless they already have a large investment in IBM hardware or are just downright masochistic.

Basically, what it comes down to is, someone needs to buy the RLX software, it's on the market now. If I were IBM, I'd buy this and retool it for IBM blades. What I'm scared of is Dell buying the RLX software. Dell blades suck, but with the RLX console, even I would consider buying Dell blades, that RLX management software is just that good.

In short, if I were IBM, I'd buy RLX in a second, and catapult myself to being the industry leader in blade servers.

The future for Apple as well?

I am curious to see how this will work out, especially since the Apple+Intel article came out in the Wall Street Journal.

(Think Secret's take: http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0505itunes49.html [thinksecret.com])

I think this is a better indication for Apple's future processors, as opposed to the Intel rumours.

Deep thought...

If IBM has ported the Linux kernel to the Cell processor, does that mean that they have to release the source code as a derivative work of the GPL if they ever sell a Cell-Blade with Linux?

Re:Deep thought...

I saw some code flying around on a mailing list somewhere. This looks good enough:

http://seclists.org/lists/linux-kernel/2005/May/26 57.html [seclists.org]

Re:Deep thought...

They already have.
One of the more interesting posts: http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/5/13/218 [lkml.org]
Arnd Bergmann works for IBM, btw.

x86 emulation?

Just wondering, could one or more of the supplementary cores be used for translating x86 instructions to RISC (and back) for the Cells main processor? I'm not really familiar with the Cell's architecture but it'd be interesting to see what companies like VMWare could do if this was the case.

Low enough heat...

Well,

If the Cell has low enough heat to be fitted in a blade, perhaps a future version could be cooled well enough to find its way into a PowerBook?

Would *that* shut up the "Apple has to switch to Intel to have faster cooler laptop chips!!! or they're D000000Med!!!!! " crowd? Maybe? Perhaps?

Heat sinks

You'd that that with all the time & $ invested, they'd at least show 'em off with active cooling a bit more advanced than the BIG sink/BIG fan combo.

An alpha teaser I wonder, or a bit of intended misdirection?

I wonder

Was it really an engineer who said these things?

If so, did he say them of his own accord, or was he instructed to say certain things? And even if that is so, it is still refreshing to hear somebody besides a marketing or management bot speak to the press.

and here I thought...

they were talking about biological computers.

oh well, maybe next time!

Cell-based Server Blade Demonstrated

First we give criminals cable TV and now web servers? What's next?

Cool!

A computer made from living Cells! Technology advances fast these days!

show us the numbers

With Cell, IBM keeps talking about "theoretical GFLOPS". I don't care about theoretical numbers. What I care about is how fast the thing runs when I run normal code compiled with a normal compiler and (possibly hand-optimized) numerical libraries.

So, what kind of SPECfp numbers does the thing get? What kind of BLAS performance does it get?

They have 2.6.11 running on it, so compiling the benchmarks should be trivial. If they haven't published anything yet (I haven't seen it), we have to believe that the numbers are less than impressive.

(Another company used to make inflated claims about the performance of their processors by computing theoretical maximums for a few SIMD instructions, unachievable in most real code. When people actually did some real benchmarks and published them against the wishes of the company, they found that their processor was no faster MHz for MHz than Pentium on real code with real compilers.)

The ultimate render farm?

Surely the logical use for a dense cell-based server would be as a monster render farm. Think of the capability of a rack of these things - Weta digital would be able to render LoTR in real-time!

The other use I can think of would be as a game server farm. IBM / Sony hae always said that the cell architecture was designed to off load workload to other cells on the network, surely there's an opportunity for ASP's to provide the heavy lifting behind a cell client device.

PS2 "Graphis Synthesizer"

They did something exactly like this with the PS2s GS (CPU in sony speak), except i think it was billed as a CG movie renderer.It was called the GScube,and i remember that one of its demo scenes had thousands of ants from the 'Bugs Life' movie rendered in realtime. It was a nice bit of tech, but as far as i know no one in the industry bothered with it. I dare say that this Cell-based server is just another GScube, only there to generate hype for the Cell/PS3, just as the GScube did for the GS/PS2. I have no problem with it if that is the case tho.

IBM sucks!

They are ruining our "Yeah, but can it run Linux?" jokes by going right ahead and using it in their first demos!

Why do we need...

I'm really excited by the Cell. I've seen a few posts so far, but they seem to be missing the point. This isn't about the move from single core to multicore, this is something quite different. I see it as the next logical step in this progression:

1. Integer Processors
2. Floating Point Processors
3. SIMD
4. Stream Processors

We're just adding a new basic functionality to the repertoire of genreal purpose CPUs. Its no more dual core than adding FPU, Altivec or BPU.

OK, not every program is going to benefit from having 8 DSPs in the core, just as most programs don't benefit from having 2 FPUs. But there will be core applications that take serious advantage, freeing up the integer unit for percieved performance enhancements.

I really hope OS X gets this. The Core APIs and Quartz Engine could be modified to take advantage, with end developers not even having to know or care.

Cell-based ideal compute servers...

I don't know why people pan these things as servers. Are people not aware that there's more to contemporary computing that HTTP daemons and database transactions?

I work in the biotech industry and we use computer farms and grids for all sorts of computationally intensive tasks: biopolymer sequence alignments, docking simulations, protein modeling, high-throughout 3D mass spectral analysis, etc.

A server with cell-blades and some minor tweaks to our software would generate a tremendous "bang-for-the-buck".

Hollywood CG studios

Combine Linux and Cell rack clusters and I can see some awesome possibilities here for animated and CG movie making.

The Cell's units may not be the best at serving up db data and files but applying it to frame processing could yield some pretty good performance.

Wait a minute

The prototype, called the Cell Processor Based Blade Server...

So they made a cell processor based blade server prototype called the cell processor based blade server? The department of reduncancy department may want to comment on this.

Old News

The patches were being sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List [kerneltraffic.org] a month ago for integrating kernel support for the Cell Processor. Just check the LKML Post [gmane.org] from IBM-Deutschland employee Arnd Bergmann.

IBM doesn't tend to release code to the public until it's been through a long approval process ;-)

MIPS are better than MFLOPS

Dunno about you, but I couldn't care less about the vector FP performance of my servers...

Putting Cell on them seems dumb for the kind of things we do on them. The 3 core PPC inside the XBox 360 seems a lot smarter choice.

For rendering farms or numeric modeling tough, they look like a smart choice.

imagine...

a bewoulf cluster of PS3s!!

It's not Sony's hype

IBM designed the Cell

NEWSFLASH!

An "xbox" related website says Sony is all hype!

Additionally, the cream of the crop of that website know more about hardware than the people designing the chip (IBM and Sony).

Yeah, hype is why I ignored anything but the raw specs and architectural papers on the cell.

Re:No.

well he did...