IBM Building PS3-Based Supercomputer

posted by   sams (94)   26 months ago (www.redherring.com)

Gaming chips will migrate from Super Mario Bros to supercomputers after IBM announced Wednesday that it will build high-performance computing systems out of these kinds of processors.

Specifically, a supercomputing machine—dubbed “Roadrunner” and set to be fully installed by 2008 at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory—will run on some 16,000 Cell Broadband Engine processors and a similar number of AMD Opteron processors. The Cell chip was originally built for Sony’s Playstation 3 console, which has been delayed until November for some markets and until 2007 in others.