Who said Sony will let you do that?

Elephants Dream was rendered on XServes. There is a GFLOP value for the 2.5GHz XServe somewhere. I think it was around 45 for the SERVER.

Cell is 200-250 GFLOPs per CPU if you believe the hype.

I checked DDR2 RAM prices just now. $4.50 for 512MBit chip. XDR with a 4.0GHz link is around $25-$50 depending on who you buy it from?

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Matt Sealey

Good blog Matt!

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

At this point I think it would be a huge loss to Sony if they lock down the Playstation3 so much that developers couldn't use it for more than just gaming. Microsoft's system has been out for over a year and will probably see a price drop before Christmas if they want to respond to competition, and the Wii is going to be so inexpensive and feature-filled that it stands to move out of #3 spot in console market. If Sony is going to have anything more to offer than the most expensive system, I would hope it would be added functionality over strictly gaming. That added functionality is one of the main reasons I'm looking forward to the PS3.

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Joshua Purcell

One can hope but chances that $ony let's you use their "computer" they produce for 700? bucks and you can buy for 599 are slim i think. They already promised computer like experience with the PS2.

Back to cell card, 256/512 MB should be enough, but i advocate a PCIe 16 interface. But the card should work in 2x an 4x mode also (in a 16x physical slot). Every "good" intel board has at least 2 times PCIe 16 slots. With time the PCIe lanes to them will grow...

Bye

Indeed; Sony make a substantial loss on the Playstation 3. iSuppli actually did a good article on this (I don't usually trust them, they make a big business out of telling people how much they are being ripped off; but in this case Sony is giving you a good deal)

I am sure they will offer a bootable Linux so that people can do desktop stuff or maybe do some homebrew development on Cell; but substantial portions of the thing are going to be locked out, nVidia's graphics chip will have no decent drivers, good luck using any ports they put on that aren't already in the Cell Linux port. Adventurous people port Linux to things like the Nintendo DS and Gamecube; but they never get used for anything. The adventure is in the Linux porting process, and getting things to work, not browsing the web using your Gamecube or Playstation 2.

Sony WERE being quoted that they would have Linux as the primary OS on the machine (i.e. when you press "home" or so on the controller, it would be some GUI over a Linux kernel) but I am sure they have since denied that and are using something custom (they have their own OS and GUI system for the Playstation "PSX", PSP handheld and Playstation 3)
This is the problem. How do you know that is enough? Or it could be WAY too much! With 512MB you have as much RAM as a Playstation 3, for example. If Sony think that is good enough to run a *FULL* game on, do you really need it for a Blender rendering module with a host machine with xGB of real RAM for other caching purposes?

It needs some thought! Anyone know anyone in the Cell team who can come here (or the partner thread on Power.org) and answer?
I think a 16x slot can have as many lanes as the designer wants; any card plugged into it has to detect how many lanes are available and adapt as part of the standard. A 16x slot with only 1 lane connected will run any current graphics card just fine; slowly.

Some PCI Express motherboards now come with 8x and 4x connectors; the OSW certainly will have a 16x slot and an 8x slot. To meet the needs of speed and availability of boards to plug it in, 1x would be best but I think 4x is the easiest and most common one to say you could support and not lock out half your market. That gives a bandwidth of 2 Gigabytes per second (1GB each way) which I think is pretty darn good for host to card transfer of geometry, encoded or encrypted data. Anyone who has a board which has at least a 4x slot could buy a Cell add-in board. However we could say 8x is the minimum - if you have a high-end board you might have this (the OSW will) and things like Infiniband and very fancy disk controllers have 8x connectors.

I don't think forcing people to give up a 16x connector is very fair or friendly, and limits the market to people who have bought an SLI board (which the point is you put graphics cards in there - 16x is the graphics card slot, baby!)

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Matt Sealey

How do i know it's enough or the right amount? Just inspiration....and with 512MB it's the Amount my GFX card has, unfortunately i had no time to try out video encoding on it. You will only get problems with too less memory if the card is working on data "randomly" and hits something that is in Main(board) memory. So the how much is enough is tied to the data you want to work on.

For the connector: The Mac Pro has 4 PCIe 16 Slots physically. I have a spare PCIe 16 slot on my Asus Board too... but i understand that not everyone has one of them to spare, most slots on Mainboards are PCIe x1 or x4 connectors.

As for the reduced SPE's or processor frequency why not? Maybe there is also a good match for SPE count/Processor Frequency and to GDDR3 or DDR2 RAM. I mean less SPE's/GHz, less data that has to come through the memory.... everything that does not cripple the fastest component on the card is ok.

Hey finally a statement on the number of PCIe slots of the OSW....

Bye

what would be a good feature for people building computers with cell in future would be to have a high speed intercard connect much like SLI with nvidia graphics cards. This would be useful in say for example blender or video editing programs. The CPU could be preparing frames. One cell could be a compositor (or frame prep' processor) and the others could be dedicated to rendering and rather than hogging the mainboard bandwidth it can all be handled between cell cards. But the major sticking point would be coming up with a standard which cards can communicate through irrelevant of manufacturer (given the appropriate hardware is present)

Matt, get this organized and in front of the Reference Platform TSC at Power.org this week. You are on the committee and the meeting is Wednesday.

@all - Good job thinking this through and holding the discussion here. Thanks!

R&B

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Already onto it
Yep thanks for all the input, guys. While there is a lot of unanswered questions there is definitely enough here to work from

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Matt Sealey

Neko somewhere (here or elsewhere) suggested an on board ethernet port (maybe GigE) for clustering, it's an accepted cheap standard for interconnection.
*IF* price does not matter, there should be the possibility of using Infiniband-but we are going in the region of Mercury priced cards here...

C'ya

the advantage of GigE is that the routers are obtainable for most people but still pricey. 8 port router is about $200-$300 in aus. 10 or more GigE would be tops.

Indeed. Or booting the thing into an OS without host OS intervention
Price DOES matter. Always.

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Matt Sealey

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/967146.html
"Breaking News:
Terra Soft to Build World's First Cell-Based Supercomputer
Tomorrow, Terra Soft will officially announce the construction of the world's first Cell-based supercomputing cluster.

In the fall of '05, Terra Soft was contacted by Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. (SCEI) to develop and manage a supercomputing cluster built upon the IBM Cell Broadband Engine and the Linux OS. This spring, Terra Soft was contracted by Sony and in August completed the construction of a 3000 sq-ft supercomputing facility capable of housing 2400 1U systems. In this remodeled extension to the Loveland, Colorado headquarters, Terra Soft will construct a test cluster and a substantially larger production cluster, dubbed "E.coli" and "Amoeba" respectively.

Terra Soft will use the test cluster "E.coli" to conduct advanced software development, optimization, and testing with emphasis on Y-HPC and Y-Bio applied to the Cell Broadband Engine. The production cluster "Amoeba" will be made available to select University and Department of Energy laboratories to further life sciences research.

The clusters will incorporate, in part, Cell-based PS3 systems. The Cell Broadband Engine provides a "1 + 8" multi-core processing environment, enabling optimized code to function at a superior level of performance over traditional single or dual core CPUs. With all 8 cores on a single chip, the code processes do not lose performance by dropping down to the memory bus as with historic, multiple CPU configurations. " http://osnews.com/story.php/16119/Terra ... ercomputer


as a side note perhaps someone here should go and inform polyhead and the rest about the Efica (gfx etc) AROS seems nice enough,another string to the bow as it were. http://moobunny.dreamhosters.com/cgi/mb ... 3922.shtml

It's been a time since the last post, so has something happened tegarding a possible, affordable PCIe addon card from Genesi?