[Beowulf] Has anyone actually seen/used a cell system?

[Geoff Jacobs]

Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Hahn" <hahn at physics.mcmaster.ca>
> To: <J.A.Delcorso at larc.nasa.gov>
> Cc: <beowulf at beowulf.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 6:51 PM
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Has anyone actually seen/used a cell system?
> 
> 
>>> Can anyone point me to a url, or tell me what their
>>> experience is with this technology?  Is it as fast as
>>> it's purported to be?
>>
>> I haven't come anywhere near a Cell, but then again, I'm not sure I'd
>> want to.  14.6 Gflops (64b, and assuming the full 8 SPE's) isn't bad,
>> but then again, a 3 GHz Core2 dual-core is 24 Gflops, and almost
>> certainly a lot more accessible, shipping now, runs linux, supported
>> by compilers and goto-blas, etc.
> 
> Comeon let's do some realistic comparision. Assuming IBM didn't totally
> mess up,
> let's do an objective compare for multiplication.
> 
> Gflops is an overrated definition simply.
> 
> The thing determining the number of matrix elements you can multiply a
> second more than anything else,
> is the slow instruction on most cpu called multiply.

See the berkeley article, it's very thorough and discusses cycle time
for most fp operations on a variety of CPUs.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~samw/projects/cell/EDGE06_abstract.pdf

-- 
Geoffrey D. Jacobs

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