IBM has released the first blade servers based on its Cell Broadband Engine processors. 

The BladeCenter QS20 models are available worldwide from today, and early test units are already deployed, the company said.

Originally developed with Toshiba and Sony for use in the forthcoming PlayStation 3 games console, the Cell BE processor is said by IBM to provide " supercomputer-like performance".

The vendor touted the servers for compute-intensive applications such as 3D rendering, compression, encryption and medical imaging.

W T Hewitt, director of research computing at the University of Manchester, which already uses the QS20, said: "Computing systems built from blades based on the Cell Broadband Engine can change the economics associated with supercomputing, and thus we are looking to migrate the range of our scientific applications."