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Chapter 1. Introduction
This chapter gives an overview of the features of the IBM
what options are available.
The BladeCenter QS21
The high performance BladeCenter QS21 is based on the 64-bit Cell Broadband
Engine
supported per blade and are directly mounted on the blade planar board to provide
multiprocessing capability. Each processor includes 32/32 KB L1 (data/instruction)
and 512 KB L2 cache.
The Cell/B.E. implementation of the broadband processor architecture includes one
PowerPC
elements (SPE). Each SPE includes one synergistic processing unit (SPU) with its
own local store (LS), and one dedicated memory flow controller (MFC), which has
an associated memory management unit (MMU) to hold and process memory
protection and access permission information. To facilitate data flow on-chip and
externally, the Cell/B.E. also implements the broadband engine bus and other I/O
structures. The memory subsystem on BladeCenter QS21 consists of 18 XDR
memory modules per Cell/B.E. chip, creating 1 GB of error checking and correction
(ECC) memory per Cell/B.E. chip. The system board therefore has a total of 2 GB
system memory.
There is a high speed RAMBUS interface to the processor, a PCI-X connector for
BladeCenter I/O extension cards, a 4x PCI-Express channel providing high speed
I/O, a 1 Gigabit Ethernet NIC, a UART and an external bus controller. Attached to
the external bus are a Flash EPROM device (8 Mbyte), 1 MB of battery-backed
NVRAM and battery-backed real-time clock (RTC).
The local service processor supports environmental monitoring, front panel, chip
initialization and the BladeCenter unit Advanced Management Module interface.
To ensure compatibility with existing blades, the BladeCenter QS21 provides two
midplane connectors. These connectors contain Gigabit Ethernet links, USB ports
(for support of BladeCenter unit media tray devices), power and a unit management
bus. The blade includes support for an optional InfiniBand expansion card and an
optional Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) card.
For more information about the processor itself, see http://www.ibm.com/
developerworks/power/cell.
Features and specifications
The BladeCenter QS21 is a high-density, high-performance multiprocessor server
system. It is based on the Cell Broadband Engine processor (Cell/B.E.) and
provides leading edge performance density with its single wide 2-way blade server.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2006, 2008
™
(Cell/B.E.) processor with a frequency of 3.2 GHz. Two processors are
®
Processor Element (PPE) element and eight synergistic processing
®
®
BladeCenter
QS21 and
1
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