Images: Mercury's blade mock-up

Mercury Computer Systems plans to release its first blade server using IBM's Cell processor in the second quarter of 2006. A mock-up of the design is shown here. The company focuses on computing tasks for military and medical equipment customers that can't be handled by conventional computing.

Mercury is betting its Cell systems will be useful for processor-intensive medical imaging tasks such as displaying information from 3D scans.

Mercury's PowerBlock 200 is a rugged Cell-based computing system intended for military applications.