Sony to Showcase High-Speed "Cell Computing Board (prototype)" at "SIGGRAPH 2007"

[one]

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/200708/07-070E/index.html
Sony to Showcase High-Speed "Cell Computing Board (prototype)" at "SIGGRAPH 2007"

Sony will be exhibiting its newly developed "Cell Computing Board (prototype)" at "SIGGRAPH 2007" ( August 7th∼9 th at San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, California, USA).

The "Cell Computing Board" incorporates the high-performance Cell Broadband EngineTM (Cell/B.E.) microprocessor and RSX® graphics processor to deliver high computational performance capable of handling large amounts of data at high speed while also achieving reductions in size and energy consumption.

This technology represents a new solution for multimedia computing applications such as computer graphics and scientific computations that require massive data quantities to be processed.

About Cell Computing Board
· High-Speed
The incorporation of RSX realizes arithmetic operation speeds beyond the 230 GFLOPS of the Cell/B.E. microprocessor alone.

· Miniaturization
"Cell Computing Board" can be embedded in a 1U (unit) sized server and mounted on a 19-inch rack.

· Lower Energy Consumption
"Cell Computing Board" delivers high computational performance while reducing power consumption to 400W or less.

Demonstration Program
At SIGGRAPH 2007, Sony will demonstrate the following sample applications using the "Cell Computing Board".

· Demonstration of 4K Applications
Real time image processing of 4K images taking advantage of the high performance of "Cell Computing Board"

· Demonstration of CG Rendering

· Demonstration of Physics Simulation
Physics simulation taking advantage of the multi-thread processing ability of "Cell Computing Board"


* The Cell/B.E. is a high-performance microprocessor jointly developed by Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., Toshiba Corporation, and IBM Corporation.
* RSX® is a graphics processor jointly developed by NVIDIA Corporation and Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.
* 4K: image resolution of 4096 × 2160 pixels (H × V) - more than four times the resolution of full HD (1920 × 1080).
* "Cell Broadband Engine" is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.

About SIGGRAPH 2007 (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics)
· Date of Exhibition: 7-9 August 2007 (Conference: 5-9 August 2007) http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/
· Venue: San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, California
· Sony Booth: No. 1249

[Freak'n Big Panda]

Ooh cool. I wonder if this solution will gain any traction in the market. Good to see sony is putting some spare ps3 parts to goo use though, they probably have a fair amount of inventory

[one]

For sure! Maybe it's the same machine as the PS3 devkit with more RAM loaded.

Interestingly it's from Sony Electronics, not Sony Computer Entertainment. From the SIGGRAPH site
http://esub.siggraph.org/cgi-bin/cgi/idEDetail.html&CompanyID=180
Sony Electronics Inc.

1 Sony Drive
Park Ridge, New Jersey 07656 USA
+1.201.358.4209 Phone
Fax

lana.gallucci@am.sony.com
www.sony.com/sxrd

Sony will demonstrate the ultra-high processing capability of the Cell Computing Unit with a variety of applications and displayed on Sony's 4K SXRD projector.

[john8]

What price point could they sell this at and who would buy it?
At $10,000
· A few research groups looking to evaluate technology

At $5,000
· Offline rendering machine?
· PS3 game developer prototyping box.

At $2000:
· Every PS3 game developer’s desk.
· About 100 Universities would create HPC or game development classes around it.
· Cut into the Cell blade where cost is a factor.

It seems it would have to find a point between IBM/Mercury blades and PS3/Linux .
Also in that space would be G80/Cuda cards.

I would have my own use for it but I must wonder if it has a market.

So who would buy this and why?

[Titanio]

Sort of sounds like a PS3 equivalent to the PS2's GSCube project, though interestingly not lead by SCE this time as mentioned.

Will be interesting to see!

[patsu]

Cool ! Reminds me of my project in the early 90s. We needed to process a huge amount of data from a Radar station and display them onto a 2K x 2K raster screen. Naturally we were bottlenecked by the CPU then.

The Cell Computing Board would be an interesting and viable solution today.

[Arwin]

Interesting here is that it seems they now have libraries to use the RSX for calculation and processing stuff rather than just displaying. Or is this nothing special? I thought it was interesting anyway (it stood out as it was mentioned specifically in the bullet points)

[Vitaly Vidmirov]

I wonder how open will it be. If ever.

[sunscar]

Alright, now for an obvious series of questions...

Who here is going to SIGGRAPH next week?
Who plans to come within close orbit of this showcase?
Who plans on returning said prescious cargo of SIGGRAPH dirt back to terra-firma?

Finally... Am I the only one who sees a couple of these stuffed into a QS20 blade-center - Something of a computing cluster and visual cluster all in one? Because in all honesty, that sounds like the intention to me, and if that's on the mark, it sounds like an honest crack at finally realizing the GSCube concept - Built modularly, one blade at a time.

[Simon F]

Alright, now for an obvious series of questions...
Who here is going to SIGGRAPH next week?

I am.
Who plans to come within close orbit of this showcase?
Probably not. I usually just attend the papers sessions.

[Urian]

I believe that it will be a PS3 but with huge amounts of RAM (2GB), BluRay Recorder and at least 2 HDD inside the case.

[one]

http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/b2b/broadcast_production/display_systems/release/31008.html
SONY AND SIDE EFFECTS SOFTWARE TO DEVELOP CELL-BASED SOLUTION

SAN DIEGO (SIGGRAPH Booths #1249, #127), Aug. 8, 2007 – Sony and Side Effects Software Inc. announced today that they are working together to provide Side Effects Software's award-winning Houdini server tools (Houdini Batch and Mantra) for Sony's new Cell Computing Board. This joint effort can empower a new generation of content creators with the seamless integration of high-performance hardware and software.


http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/b2b/broadcast_production/display_systems/release/31006.html
SONY AND MENTAL IMAGES TO BRING MENTAL RAY® TO THE CELL/B.E. PLATFORM

SAN DIEGO (SIGGRAPH Booth #1249) Aug. 8, 2007 – Sony and mental images are announcing a joint project that will allow the Academy Award® winning mental ray® high-end rendering software to operate with Sony’s new prototype Cell Computing Board in a range of visualization workflows that feature Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) technology.

...

An essential element of the project will be the support of mental images’s new universal MetaSL™ shading language on the Cell Computing Board platform. A large library of essential shaders will be provided. In addition, MetaSL shaders can easily be created with mental mill™, the graphical shader creation and development technology from mental images.

[Vitaly Vidmirov]

IBM on siggraph: Raytracing with 14 CELLs (112 SPUs)

http://gametomorrow.com/blog/index.php/2007/08/01/off-to-siggraph/

The iRT now uses automatic code overlay support to switch shaders and read/write software caches to spill, sort, bundle, and evaluate secondary rays. These two coding features allowed the programming team to ignore the SPE's 256KB local store size for both code and data fetch and eliminated the need for programmer directed DMAs.

[Nesh]

Sort of sounds like a PS3 equivalent to the PS2's GSCube project, though interestingly not lead by SCE this time as mentioned.

Will be interesting to see!

Thats exactly what came in my mind as well :)

[one]

http://journal.mycom.co.jp/articles/2007/08/24/siggraph08/index.html

Zenji Nishikawa does reporting for the demo, apparently photo was only permitted from the outside of the booth.

RSX diagram (host/FE -> geometry -> raster -> fragment shader/texture -> ROP, plus L2 texture cache and 2D raster in the left and right)
http://journal.mycom.co.jp/photo/articles/2007/08/24/siggraph08/images/003l.jpg

Cell Computing Board diagram
http://journal.mycom.co.jp/photo/articles/2007/08/24/siggraph08/images/004l.jpg

Cell has 1GB XDR DRAM. RSX has no VRAM attached while the Super Companion Chip as the southbridge has 1GB DDR2 SDRAM and additional 8GB DDR2 SDRAM via a memory expansion adapter through PCI-e 4x. So 10GB RAM in total.

The OS is Linux, the supported API is OpenGL 1.5, and the supported shader language is Cg.

The demo used a SRX-S110 4K2K SXRD projector.

The first demo is decoding 1,000 SD MPEG2 streams simultaneously while showing them as textures in realtime 3D graphics.

The second demo is physics simulation by Havok, dynamic destruction of 1,000 objects.

The next demo is ink simulation called "SUMINAGASHI" that shows fluid physics by MoXi.

The last one is a 4K2K tech demo, 1 Cell board does realtime color correction for a 4K2K video stream. Then 3 Cell boards encode 24fps baseband non-compressed 4K2K video in realtime. The 4K2K digital cinema codec is 4:4:4 JPEG2000 and 24 SPUs can process it realtime with a constant 250Mbps throughput. 3 Cell boards are connected each other with GbE and the video output is 4 HD SDI to SRX-S110. The processing power is still left in this demo, it does QVGA MPEG-4 AVC encoding and broadcasts it to PSP via WLAN while encoding a 4K2K stream, all in realtime.

Right now there's no immediate release date for this product, but it seems they plan deployment to the professional market.

http://journal.mycom.co.jp/articles/2007/08/24/siggraph08/images/006l.jpg
http://journal.mycom.co.jp/articles/2007/08/24/siggraph08/images/005l.jpg

[patsu]

Ok so, there is a way to access RSX from Linux today. Free it Sony, FREE IT !

[Titanio]

The first demo is decoding 1,000 SD MPEG2 streams simultaneously while showing them as textures in realtime 3D graphics.

The second demo is physics simulation by Havok, dynamic destruction of 1,000 objects.

The next demo is ink simulation called "SUMINAGASHI" that shows fluid physics by MoXi.

Sounds neat. Is it mentioned how many boards are used in these demos?

[one]

Sounds neat. Is it mentioned how many boards are used in these demos?Not mentioned, however a person who watched the last year's demo (4,000 QVGA MPEG2 streams) explicitly said the last year's one was done on one Cell and one RSX, which indicates they are on one board too.

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=772988&postcount=1