IBM adds Cell chips to mainframe

Stephen Withers
Friday, 27 April 2007 14:09

Your IT - Home IT

IBM is targeting the operators of virtual worlds - typified by Second Life - with the development of a hybrid system combining mainframe technology with the Cell Broadband Engine as used in the Sony PlayStation 3.

"As online environments increasingly incorporate aspects of virtual reality - including 3D graphics and lifelike, real-time interaction among many simultaneous users - companies of all types will need a computing platform that can handle a broad spectrum of demanding performance and security requirements," said Jim Stallings, general manager, IBM System z. "To serve this market, the Cell/B.E. processor is the perfect complement to the mainframe, the only server designed to handle millions of simultaneous users."

IBM's collaborator on the project is Brazilian online games company Hoplon Entertainment.

The idea is that the Cells will handle compute-intensive tasks needed to model a virtual world such as simulating the movement of objects under gravity, while the mainframe looks after functions such as managing large numbers of users, billing, security and communicating with the real world.

Mainframes provide a high-bandwidth environment enabling hundreds of processors to communicate much more rapidly than is possible via a network of separate computers.

Once labelled as dinosaur technology, mainframes have been reinvented as super-servers capable of handling massive numbers of transactions per second.

The project could also result in systems for other types of business applications that are computationally intensive.

IBM did not indicate when the first hybrid system will be completed.