Cell/B.E. blades: Building blocks for scalable, real-time, interactive, and digital media servers

The Cell Broadband Engine™ (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 Blade Center® 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. © Copyright 2007 by International Business Machines Corporation.