General Computational Accelerators

Introduction
HPC Architecture
  1. Shared-memory SIMD machines
  2. Distributed-memory SIMD machines
  3. Shared-memory MIMD machines
  4. Distributed-memory MIMD machines
  5. ccNUMA machines
  6. Clusters
  7. Processors
    1. AMD Magny-Cours
    2. IBM POWER6
    3. IBM POWER7
    4. IBM PowerPC 970MP
    5. IBM BlueGene processors
    6. Intel Xeon
    7. The SPARC processors
  8. Accelerators
    1. GPU accelerators
      1. ATI/AMD
      2. nVIDIA
    2. General accelerators
      1. The IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell processor
      2. ClearSpeed/Petapath
    3. FPGA accelerators
      1. Convey
      2. Kuberre
      3. SRC
  9. Networks
    1. Infiniband
    2. InfiniPath
    3. Myrinet
Available systems
  • The Bull bullx system
  • The Cray XE6
  • The Cray XMT
  • The Cray XT5h
  • The Fujitsu FX1
  • The Hitachi SR16000
  • The IBM BlueGene/L&P
  • The IBM eServer p575
  • The IBM System Cluster 1350
  • The NEC SX-9
  • The SGI Altix UV series
    		•
    Systems disappeared from the list
    Systems under development
    Glossary
    Acknowledgments
    References

    Although we have looked at the GPUs in the former section primarily from the point-of-view of computational accelerators, they are of course full-blown high-end graphical processors in the first place. Several vendors have developed accelerators that did not have graphical processing in mind as the foremost application to be served (although they might not be bad in this respect when compared to general CPUs). The future of the general computational accelerators is problematic: in principle it is entirely possible to make such accelerators that can compete with GPUs or with the FPGA-based accelerators discussed in the section on FPGA accelerators but the volume will always be much lower than that of the other two accelerator variants which is reflected in the production cost.
    We discuss two of these accelerators: the Cell processor and the ClearSpeed processor for completeness' sake but it is doubtful that they will survive as marketable products.