College of Computing Wins Cell Processor Center

The College of Computing at Georgia Tech has been designated as the first Sony-Toshiba-IBM Center of Competence to build a community of programmers and broaden industry support for the Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor.

Cell BE “supercharges” compute-intensive applications, offering fast performance for computer entertainment and handhelds, virtual reality, wireless downloads, real-time video chat, interactive TV shows and other “image-hungry” computing environments.

The Cell BE processor already appears in such products as Sony’s PlayStation 3, Toshiba’s Cell Reference Set and the IBM BladeCenter QS20.

“The College of Computing at Georgia Tech firmly believes that the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Cell BE processor represents the future of computing using heterogeneous multi-core processors, and we are pleased to work with three leading technology companies in a broad collaboration that will demonstrate the extreme performance of Cell,” said David A. Bader, associate professor and executive director of high-performance computing in the College of Computing.

“By supporting the growth of the industry-changing Cell BE processor technology, the College of Computing at Georgia Tech will drive the continued advancement of computationally intensive applications that will directly impact the global growth of our industry and the evolution of our society,” Bader said.

Directed by Bader, the STI Cell Center of Competence, located in the Christopher W. Klaus Advanced Computing Building, will provide remote access to Cell blade hardware installed at Georgia Tech, create and disseminate software optimized for Cell BE systems and perform research on the design of Cell BE systems, algorithms and applications.

http://gtalumni.org/buzzwords/dec06/article88.html