Symhpony

Cell is a microprocessor architecture jointly developed by Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI". The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a budget reported by IBM as approaching US$400 million. Cell is shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture , commonly abbreviated CBEA in full or Cell BE in part. Cell combines a general-purpose Power Architecture core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.

The first major commercial application of Cell was in Sony's PlayStation 3 game console. Mercury Computer Systems has a dual Cell server, a dual Cell blade configuration, a rugged computer, and a PCI Express accelerator board available in different stages of production. Toshiba has announced plans to incorporate Cell in high definition television sets. Exotic features such as the XDR memory subsystem and coherent Element Interconnect Bus (EIB) interconnect appear to position Cell for future applications in the supercomputing space to exploit the Cell processor's prowess in floating point kernels. IBM has announced plans to incorporate Cell processors as add-on cards into IBM System z9 mainframes, to enable them to be used as servers for MMORPGs

The Cell architecture includes a novel memory coherence architecture for which IBM received many patents. The architecture emphasizes efficiency/watt, prioritizes bandwidth over latency, and favors peak computational throughput over simplicity of program code. For these reasons, Cell is widely regarded as a challenging environment for software development. IBM provides a comprehensive Linux-based Cell development platform to assist developers in confronting these challenges. Software adoption remains a key issue in whether Cell ultimately delivers on its performance potential. Despite those challenges, research has indicated that Cell excels at several types of scientific computation.

In November 2006, David A. Bader at Georgia Tech was selected by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM from more than a dozen universities to direct the first STI Center of Competence for the Cell Processor. This partnership is designed to build a community of programmers and broaden industry support for the Cell processor. There is a Cell Programming tutorial video available.

The mobile phone (also called a mobile, wireless, cellular phone, cell phone, or hand phone(hp)) is a short-range, portable electronic device used for mobile voice or data communication over a network of specialized base stations known as cell sites. In addition to the standard voice function of a telephone, current mobile phones may support many additional services, and accessories, such as SMS for text messaging, email, packet switching for access to the Internet, and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video. Most current mobile phones connect to a cellular network of base stations (cell sites), which is in turn interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) (the exception is satellite phones). Since the mid-2000s, an increasing number of cellphones can connect to the Internet, a portion of which can be navigated using cellphones.

Active Directory ( AD ) is an implementation of LDAP directory services by Microsoft for use primarily in Windows environments. Its main purpose is to provide central authentication and authorization services for Windows-based computers. Active Directory also allows administrators to assign policies, deploy software, and apply critical updates to an organization. Active Directory stores information and settings in a central database. Active Directory networks can vary from a small installation with a few hundred objects, to a large installation with millions of objects.

Active Directory was previewed in 1996, released first with Windows 2000 Server edition, and revised to extend functionality and improve administration in Windows Server 2003. Additional improvements were made in both Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2008.

Active Directory was called NTDS (NT Directory Service) in older Microsoft documents. This name can still be seen in some AD binaries.

There is a common misconception that Active Directory provides software distribution. Software distribution is run by a separate service that uses additional proprietary schema attributes that work in conjunction with the LDAP protocol. Active Directory does not automate software distribution, but provides a mechanism in which other services can provide software distribution.