Only Sky is a limit,
So lets the real job
start
S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005 , 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005
When Big Blue comes to play
it plays BIG!
S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005 , 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005
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
There is a lot of interesting things inside the CELL
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?
S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005 , 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005
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
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
can host 16 stations 4
Gbps VLBI correlator or equivalent beam
former solution
• Unless you would need a very
computation demanding application:
already has such boards)
S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005 , 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005
For such VLBI correlation like it was done for Huygens
project it can take more than 100000 ops/sample/station,
JIVE’s experience
Correlator
CCC
DDD
Station Units and DDU
EEE
MK5/MK4 UNITS
1 2
141516
T-Base 10/100/1000 LAN
Channel data
from MK5's
Linux
Cluster
Unpack,
Filter,
Phase subtract
Phase Fitting,
Fringing
Celestial Model
from CCC
Ephemerids and Navigation data
on Titan/Huygens from JPL
Phase corrections
from AIPS
AIPS
calibration
and
imaging
Control and Visualisation
Workstation
S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005 , 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005 Let’s check IO capacity then..
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
iSAS – Serial Attached SCSI over TCP/IP
Over 10G TCP/IP thought..
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,
How much Gbps per logical unit per station would be enough?
S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005 , 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005
16 stations,
4 Gbps/station
Single board, 16 CELLs,
16 of 10G fiber connections
COMMUNICATION LOGIC
VLBI solution
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
CELL
(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!
COMMUNICATION LOGIC
Performance is limited by the number of GFlops,
not by IO
S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005 , 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005
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
• 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
And to make it really interesting !
S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005 , 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005
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
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
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)
S. Pogrebenko, 10.08.2005 , 04.10.2005 & 12.10.2005