KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany, June 22 -- The Competence Center for HPC at the Fraunhofer ITWM will present results of its ongoing cooperation with the IBM Development Lab in Böblingen during ISC 2007 next week in Dresden.

They will demonstrate a finance application running on a Playstation cluster. The cluster is integrated with Fraunhofer's Grid Middelware PHASTGrid, which parallelizes the application and keeps all the Cell SPEs busy. The compute-intensive application calculates the value of equity derivatives and is broadly used in finance. A single Cell SPE outperforms a 3.0 GHz single-core Xeon processor.
 
IBM and Fraunhofer will also demonstrate the use of IBM's Cell processor in an interactive simulation environment that is used to optimize a new cooling technique. Fraunhofers parallelization Framework GraPA had been used to develop and run the parallel application on all available SPEs in the Playstation Cluster. In this demonstration the heat exchanger geometry, which is part of an absortion cooling system, can be modified interactively through a graphical interface and the resulting impact on the flow pattern is calulated and displayed.
 
Because of the GraPA framework, development time is shortened and high performance on the full system is achieved. The underlying CFD code, based on the Lattice Boltzmann Method, runs up to 10 GFLOPS per SPE. The Playstation achieves 0.3 GFLOPS/watt and roughly 0.1 GFLOPS/Euro -- a peak value.

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Source: Fraunhofer ITWM