Toronto, Canada-based imaging firm ISG Technologies Inc is developing what it says are supercomputing-class hardware accelerators for graphical and imaging applications. They are based on the PowerPC 601 manufactured for Motorola Inc by IBM Corp. An entry-level Pulsus system with one board comes with eight 601s and 256Mb RAM going to 576 SPECfp92 and 432 SPECint92 – and it will scale to 32 CPUs. Pulsus runs Posix parallel threads and applications for it can be compiled on single CPU or symmetric multiprocessing systems. The Pulsus symmetric multiprocessing series will be released in the fourth quarter and is aimed at providing high-performance for both computation and visualisation-intensive tasks, such as seismology and medical applications, ISG says. ISG offers turnkey symmetric multiprocessing for the medical industry.
