Highlights

• Third generation blade system based on an enhanced version of the Cell Broadband Engine™ Architecture
• IBM PowerXCell™ 8i processor, offering five times the double precision performance of the previous Cell/B.E. processor
• High-performance blade solution for selected workloads
• Significant performance acceleration of target workloads such as rendering and medical imaging
• Up to 32 GB of processor memory

The IBM BladeCenter® QS22 is based on the innovative multi-core IBM PowerXCell 8i processor, a new generation processor based on the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) Architecture. Offering extraordinary double precision floating point processing power, the QS22 can yield application results faster and with more fidelity. This can enable organizations to get information faster to facilitate important business decisions.

For many years, organizations have relied on performance gains from increasing clock speeds of “traditional” microprocessor architectures. However, in recent years this approach has been challenged by the physical limitations of semiconductors and by traditional processor architecture implementations. Issues with power consumption, heat dissipation and memory latencies have led to diminishing returns on performance. High performance computing (HPC) applications such as digital content creation, electronic design automation, image and signal processing, financial algorithms, scientific research, and seismic processing may need a fundamentally new technology and approach to the system-level architecture to achieve the desired level of performance.

Product features

• IBM PowerXCell 8i processors offer extreme performance to accelerate compute-intensive tasks such as financial analytics, seismic processing, image processing, signal processing and graphics rendering
• Single-wide blade form factor provides extraordinary computing density—up to 6.4 TFLOPS Single Precision and up to 3.0 TFLOPS Double Precision performance in a single BladeCenter H chassis
• Build a complex multi-platform environment in a highly efficient architecture

Hardware summary

• Features two high-performance IBM PowerXCell 8i processors
• Up to 32 GB DDR2 memory
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet
• Optional Dual-port DDR InfiniBand® 4x HCA connected through PCI-Express (43W4423)
• Optional Serial Attached SCSI daughter cards connected through PCI-X (39Y9190)
• BladeCenter PCIe expansion unit (43W4391)
• Optional 8 GB flash drive
• Optional I/O buffer memory DIMMs (up to 2 GB, 2 x 1 GB)