[Beowulf] Has anyone actually seen/used a cell system?

[John Leidel]

Uh oh... I see another HPL debate looming in the wings.  :-)
Once again, we find ourselves debating how to measure synthetic 
performance in order to quantitatively compare extremely disparate 
architectures. 
The HPL test(s) fill a need.  However, my personal belief is that we 
must simply wait until the machine is built and decide based on /real/ 
workloads how it performs. 
The cell is certainly an interesting, yet complex, approach to 
computing.   My only fear is that we, as an industry, are not paying 
close attention to our common strategic goal : Perform more science per 
unit time.  So I pose a question, with the advent of such complex 
machines, are we taking a step forward or in reverse? 

Joe Landman wrote:
> Craig Tierney wrote:
>
>> see it in the near future.  The key to winning the Roadrunner 
>> proposal was to get HPL to run at over 1 PF (science be damned).  The 
>> Cell
>
> heh ...
>
> Maybe it is time to define a unit of measure.
>
>   1 HPL = 1 TF
>
> or something like that ...
>
>
>