An experimental cell-based system to investigate latency hiding methods

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This is a proposal to obtain a heterogeneous computational cluster testbed comprising a head node and four computational nodes. This cluster is based on the newly released IBM Cell processor, a multi-core highly efficient computational engine specifically developed to power graphics and video applications. The head node is a dual processor IBM-based blade system while the computational nodes are SONY Playstation3, each one comprising a single cell processor. The chosen heterogeneous configuration was chosen because of the very advantageous price of the SONY Playstation3. The testbed will be used to study and implement communications latency hiding techniques which will allow better application scaling. In addition, the large computational capabilities will be used in developing neural network-based models of biological activity for a number of chemical compounds (quantitative structure activity relationship). These models enable fast and accurate exploration of the pharmaceutical potential of  chemicals, reducing thus the expense and the time involved in the development of new pharmaceuticals.