IBM has announced a new thinner Cell-based blade system, allowing twice as many units to be fitted per rack, and an SDK intended to ease development in the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) environment.

Dubbed the IBM BladeCenter QS21, the new board is rated for peak performance of "approximately 460" Gflops, allowing 6.4 Teraflops in a single BladeCenter chassis and over 25.8 Teraflops in a standard 42U rack. IBM claims power efficiency, too, 1.05 Gflops per watt (or 3.8 quadrillion floating point operations per tenpenny kilowatt-hour, if you like). The QS21 and accompanying SDK for Multicore Acceleration Version 3.0 will be available from October.

According to Jim Comfort, IBM Global Engineering veep for Optimized Systems, the QS21 "incorporates not only twice the memory and density, but can now function either as a standalone blade server, or as a seamless addition to existing POWER or x86-based system."

The new blade in the armoury, as well as being slimmer, boasts an extra 2GB of I/O buffer memory. Together with the new SDK, IBM hope it will be snapped up by customers needing to run intensive graphics applications such as 3D rendering, compression and encryption. An image-rendering demo called "Interactive Ray Tracer" is available on IBM's alphaWorks website.

The SDK is designed to allow "partitioning of a customer application across a hybrid computing platform consisting of an x86 based system and one or more BladeCenter QS21s." IBM hopes this will encourage people to add QS21s to existing platforms.

Sony may be using Cell to power its charge on the living room in the PS3, but IBM are evidently looking more at the industries which provide content for that living room.®

Related stories

IBM attacks HP's dwarf blade with muffler (4 October 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/10/04/ibm_muffled_bladecenters/
IBM and Novell push out new SLED (6 September 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/09/06/ibm_novell_sled/
IBM Information Server Blade tackles data integration (9 August 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/08/09/ibm_information_server_blade/
Sony faces case for 'Cell' patent infringement (31 July 2007)
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/07/31/sony_cell_patent/
Dell paddles 'blade everything' HP (19 July 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/07/19/dell_hp_blade/
Blade servers as told by the master (10 July 2007)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/10/scc_episodeone_bladeboy/
Blades carve up Top 500 supercomputers list (5 July 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/07/05/top500_supercomputers_announced/
Fujitsu sharpens blade server (27 June 2007)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/06/27/fujitsu_primergy_blade_server/
Sony PlayStation 3 (23 March 2007)
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/23/review_sony_playstation_3/
IBM produces smaller Cells (13 March 2007)
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/13/ibm_produces_65nm_cell/
Of IBM's Cell-Based Blade (27 September 2006)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/09/27/ibm_bladecenter_qs20/
Cell-based computer breaks out of IBM (13 September 2006)
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/09/13/ibm_ships_cell/