The Cell Broadband Enginee (Cell/B.E.) processor, developed jointly by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM primarily for next-generation gaming consoles, packs a level of floating-point, vector, and integer streaming performance in one chip that is an order of magnitude greater than that of traditional commodity microprocessors. Cell/B.E. blades are server and supercomputer building blocks that use the Cell/B.E. processor, the high-volume IBM BladeCentert server platform, high-speed commodity networks, and open-system software. In this paper we present the design of the Cell/B.E. blades and discuss several early application prototypes and results.
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