IBM beefs up Cell blade server

Stephen Withers
Friday, 31 August 2007 12:42

Your IT - Home IT

IBM's new BladeCenter QS21 doubles the number of Cell Broadband Engines that can be accommodated in one chassis.

Company officials say the system is suitable for wide range of industries, including those that create and run highly visual, graphic and immersive, real-time applications such as 3D rendering, compression, and encryption.

The new model also provides an extra 2G of I/O buffer memory and supports 16 lanes of single data rate Infiniband.

"With the QS21 customers benefit from an evolution of Cell/BE-based blade server technology that incorporates not only twice the memory and density, but can now function either as a standalone blade server, or as a seamless addition to existing POWER or x86-based system," said Jim Comfort, vice president for optimised systems, IBM Global Engineering Solutions. "Coupled with the new Cell/BE Software Development Kit, which streamlines application development, we've introduced a package that will allow more businesses to benefit from the proven power of the Cell/BE processor."

IBM claims the QS21 is among the most energy-efficient platforms at 1.05GigaFLOPS per watt.

BladeCenter QS21 configurations can deliver 6.4 TeraFLOPS from a single chassis and over 25.8 TeraFLOPS from a standard 42U rack.

The QS21 will ship on October 26, just 13 months after the delivery of the original BladeCenter QS20. The SDK mentioned by Comfort will be available one week earlier.