The new members are: AboveMicro, Anyka Cayman, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Celestica, DAFCA, Forte Design Automation, Rapport Incorporated, Teak Technologies, TimeLab, Universal Scientific Industrial and Venture Corporation. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is the clear anchor member in Europe, having recently built a cluster from IBM’s PowerPC 970-based BladeCenter JS20 blade servers in Madrid.
This machine has 3,564 of IBM’s 2.2GHz PowerPC 970 chips, and delivers 20.5 teraflops of sustained number-crunching power. Most of the other members are chip designers, software firms that sell chip design applications, or provide turn-key electronics that use processors. The original Power.org members include: AMCC, Bull, Cadence Design Systems, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Culturecom, IBM, Jabil Circuit, Novell, Red Hat, Sony, Shanghai Belling, Synopsys, Thales Computers, Tundra Semiconductor and Wistron. Interestingly, Thales is announcing a dual-processor embedded system based on the PowerPC 970 chip aimed at the avionics industry.
In addition to adding new members to the Power.org consortium, IBM said it would provide the specifications for the Cell processor, a future chip derived from Power cores that it has been working on with Sony and Toshiba for computers and consumer electronics such as game machines and HDTVs. The Cell chip is at the heart of Sony’s PlayStation 3 console, and is expected to be used in a variety of electronics. IBM is also planning to provide certain software libraries to make use of the Cell chips as open source software, including a software development kit and maybe even a version of Linux tweaked for the chips.
