Mercury Computer Systems Announces the First Cell BE Processor-Based Product for Industrial, Medical, and Military Markets
Initial Orders Expected for Early-Access System
CHELMSFORD, Mass., Oct. 6 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRCY) announced the Dual Cell-Based Blade, Mercury's first product based on the IBM(R) Cell BE (Broadband Engine) processor. As announced in June 2005, Mercury is partnering with IBM Engineering & Technology Services to integrate Cell technology into a range of products designed to address computationally intensive applications in aerospace and defense, seismic, semiconductor test, and medical imaging, as well as other markets. Availability of the Dual Cell-Based Blade is planned for Q1 of calendar 2006, and production is planned for the following quarter.
The Dual Cell-Based Blade, based on IBM's industry-leading BladeCenter(R) design, will offer unprecedented peak performance of 400 GFLOPS and feature two IBM Cell BE processors, as well as XDR(TM) memory from Rambus Inc. An online data sheet is available at
www.mc.com/cell.
Detailed specifications of this product have been shared under NDA with various customers, and initial orders for early-access systems are anticipated in the near-term.
In keeping with Mercury's strategy to leverage open standards where available, the Dual Cell-Based Blade software environment will run on the Linux(R) OS, and Mercury will provide the Eclipse-based open source software framework necessary to harness the tremendous processing power of the Cell processor architecture -- integrating the compilers, debuggers, math libraries, utilities and middleware in a seamless fashion.
Utilizing the open standards that IBM delivered through its development and offering of the BladeCenter ecosystem, the Dual Cell-Based Blade will be available in the IBM BladeCenter platform, which integrates server, storage, and networking functionality to provide upward scalability and performance density for computing needs in a variety of applications. Scalable to seven blades in a 7U configuration, the Dual Cell-Based Blade is expected to provide up to 2.8 teraFLOPS of processing performance in a 7U form factor, and up to 16 teraFLOPS in a six-foot rack.
