IBM BladeCenter QS21
Highlights
- Second generation blade system based on Cell Broadband Engine™ Processors
- Potential 10x or greater performance acceleration of target workloads
- High-performance blade solution for graphics-intensive and high performance computing (HPC) applications
For many years, organizations have relied on performance gains from increasing clock speeds of “traditional” microprocessor architectures. However, in recent years this approach has been challenged by the physical limitations of semiconductors and by traditional processor architecture implementations. Issues with power consumption, heat dissipation and memory latencies have led to diminishing returns on performance. High performance computing (HPC) cluster applications such as digital content creation, digital video surveillance, electronic design automation, image and signal processing, financial algorithms, scientific research, and seismic processing, may need a fundamentally new technology and approach to the system-level architecture to achieve the desired level of performance.
Cell/B.E. multi-core innovation
Enter the IBM BladeCenter® QS21 based on the multi-core Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) processor. When used to complement systems based on traditional processors, the QS21 can yield application results faster and with more fidelity. This can enable organizations to get information faster to facilitate important business decisions.
Product features | Hardware summary | |
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Specification
Form factor | Single-wide blade server for BladeCenter | ||
Processors | 3.2 GHz Cell/B.E. Processors | ||
Number of processors | Two standard, each with one PPE core and eight SPE cores | ||
L2 cache | 512 KB per Cell/B.E. Processor, plus 256 KB of local store memory for each SPE | ||
Memory | 2 GB (1 GB per processor) | ||
Internal disk storage | None | ||
Networking | Dual Gigabit Ethernet | ||
I/O upgrade | Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) daughter card connected via PCI-X (CFFv) | ||
Optional connectivity | Dual-port InfiniBand 4x HCA connected via PCI-Express (SFF) | ||
Operating systems | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11 | ||
Warranty | 1-year |