The blade features two IBM Cell BE processors as well as XDR memory from Rambus Inc.
Mercury is partnering with IBM Engineering & Technology Services to integrate Cell technology into a range of products designed for computationally-intensive applications in aerospace and military, seismic, semiconductor test and medical imaging markets.
Availability of the dual Cell-based blade is planned for the first quarter of 2006, and production is planned for the following quarter. The Cell-based software environment will run on the Linux OS, and Mercury (Chelmsford, Mass.) said it will provide the Eclipse-based open source software framework for integrating the compilers, debuggers, math libraries, utilities and middleware.
The blade will be available in the IBM BladeCenter platform, and will be scalable up to seven blades in a 7U configuration. It 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.