BladeCenter QS21

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
Cell/B.E. processors offer extreme performance to accelerate compute-intensive tasks such as image processing, signal processing and graphics rendering Single-wide blade form factor provides extraordinary computing density—up to 6.4 TFLOPS in a single BladeCenter H chassis Build a complex multi-platform environment in a highly efficient architecture		Features two high-performance Cell/B.E. processors 2 GB standard processor memory Dual Gigabit Ethernet Optional Dual-port 4x InfiniBand HCA connected through PCI-Express Optional Serial Attached SCSI daughter cards connected through PCI-X Optional I/O buffer memory DIMMs (up to 2 GB, 4x512 MB)