* Astronomy

Mercury Computer Systems announced a $7,999 accelerator card Tuesday that uses the Cell Broadband Engine processor that plugs into a computer's PCI slot. The Cell Accelerator Board, which will be generally available in the first quarter of 2007, can speed tasks such as signal processing or image rendering, Mercury said in an announcement at the Siggraph computer graphics show in Boston.

Cell supplies various software tools to let customers make use of the board, and also sells it in a workstation running Windows or Linux on dual Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors. The board itself also can run Yellow Dog Linux. IBM, Toshiba and Sony co-developed the Cell processor, which is the heart of the forthcoming Sony Playstation 3 game console.

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