1. Only Sky is a limit, So lets the real job start S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

2. When Big Blue comes to play it plays BIG! S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

3. Big Blue unveils Cell architecture http://www-1.ibm.com/businesscenter/venturedevelopment/us/en/featurearticle/gcl_xmlid/8649/nav_id/emerging Just as the cells in a body unite to form complete physical systems, a "Cell" architecture will allow all kinds of electronic devices (from consumer products to supercomputers) to work together, signaling a new era in Internet entertainment, communications and collaboration. And Radio Astronomy too, I bet.. S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

4. http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cell/Cell0_v2.html 221 square mm 90 nm SOI, 65 nm tech on the way, 4 GHz clock, 256 GFlops, And thermal take just 30 W Oops..! 76.8 GBytes per second IO is equivalent of 600 Mk5s ! More than the total amount of Mk5s on Earth ! But wait.. 256 GFlops ? That’s about 100 PCs? What it really means? There is a lot of interesting things inside the CELL S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

5. 256 GFlops, be careful ! It’s not a Von Neumann machine. But we don’t need to run Google search engine on it, neither such applications like Photoshop or PowerPoint. Guess we have our own, Radio Astronomy related applications in mind So, how it can do the job for us? S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

6. So, what we can get from all these GFlops? It takes 100-1000 ops/sample/station to make a beam former or SFX correlator (depending on required spectral resolution) One CELL with 256 GFlops can deliver as much as 16 station solution for a single 8-64 MHz wide channel 16 CELL board (the are rumors on the net that Big Blue already has such boards) can host 16 stations 4 Gbps VLBI correlator or equivalent beam former solution Unless you would need a very computation demanding application: S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

7. For such VLBI correlation like it was done for Huygens project it can take more than 100000 ops/sample/station, JIVE’s experience Let’s check IO capacity then..S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

8. Aggregated IO bandwidth 10-100 Tbps that’s from where a real fun starts Q : How to feed this beast? Any industry spec solution? A : Yes, just mount your remote telescope as another SCSI device, they call it iSAS. That’s just an example S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

9. iSAS – Serial Attached SCSI over TCP/IP It’s HP, not Big Blue, but I heard on the net that BB has something similar in mind, And it can be NFS over Infiniband or GE, Over 10G TCP/IP thought.. How much Gbps per logical unit per station would be enough? S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

10. 16 stations, 4 Gbps/station VLBI solution (space craft tracking enabled) or baby-SKA beam former or FPA descrambler ( for just 1 kW thermal ) For more band width consider the cooling first! Single board, 16 CELLs, 16 of 10G fiber connections Performance is limited by the number of GFlops, not by IO S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

11. NGC : 64 Gbps per station, 1 Tbps total can be fit into washing machine size box, Dual solution can go to 2 Tbps throughput! It’ll just take about 1 Liter/second water flow to absorb 30 kW of thermal power. S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

12. Two-Cells Prototype Board Looks like a real prototype Two big chips at the left side are CELL CPUs, Currently running at 2.8 GHz (not 4 GHz as by spec), And at 80 W of thermal take each (promised 30) Two big chips at the left side are South Bridges From FlexIO to PCI-express to Infiniband (10 Gbps), S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

13. And to make it really interesting ! S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

14. More for baby-SKA Yes, DL (KIDDY) + RT selfcal in voltage domain + Core to Core Correlator : DLSFX Conclusion: CELL processor seems to be a suitable platform for next generation radio astronomy play stations S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005

15. Prototyping job done: Broad band correlation on the ref source and Ultra narrow band correlation on Huygens Now can run on the same HW/SW platform

16. S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005, 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005 Only Sky is a limit, So lets the real job start Image Credit: NASA, ESA, B. Mobasher (Space Telescope Science Institute and the European Space Agency)