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Linux Chosen for IBM's New Supercomputer
Uhh_Duh writes "news.com is reporting that Linux will be the main OS in the Blue Gene - IBM's $100m supercomputer project. The Blue Gene will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory." Wow. That's a lot of nuclear weapons simulations.
I guess this makes the demise of AIX official.
IBM is pooling all its resources into Linux now.
I suppose that's both a good and a bad thing.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
to be displayed in the Framebuffer at startup...
See my blog for my free opinions.
The article doesn't seem to say... their own special flavor or something standard?
sig.
can you play quake on it?
dybia felly dwi a hampster (i think therefore i am a hampster)
In other news, the oil companies rejoyce as they plan the new power plant that this number of processors will require.
It seems to be the ideal system to run the next Microsoft operating system.
To quote someone else: "16 trillion bytes should be enough for everyone."
does anyone know if ibm contribute BACK to open source? or are they sponging off all the OSS developers?
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
That's a lot of nuclear weapons simulations.
RTFA. That's a lot of protein fold simulations.
What's the official benchmark of this thing, on a well known scale like QFPS (Quake Frames Per Second)...? :)
Imagine a....i'll stop there ;)
Nah really, if IBM are gonna throw there dev teams behind linux isn't this the first corporate computer giant showing there support for linux at last? fine we have others using linux but not developing for linux
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
Maybe they can predict the weather a couple of days with this. The best way is still to put your finger in the air. Its about time someone changes that.
About nuclear testing, isnt the capability to destroy the whole earth enough? Kinda makes me less worried about Saddam and more worried about the cowboy in charge.
HTTP/1.1 400
... id Software finally found a proper testing environment for Doom 3!
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Building a computer, to tell you how to build another, larger, more complex computer. Hrmmm..
Three dits, four dits, two dits, dah!
Radio, radio, rah rah rah!
There's A nice presentation[ibm.com] that describes the system quite well.
The Blue Gene will contain 65,000 processors
... :)
But what they don't tell you it that it is 65,000 old 386DXs
man
No manual entry for
Anyone else notice this?
The decision to adopt Linux came, in part, as a result of the growing size and strength of the open-source community. Thousands of developers around the world are participating in the evolution of Linux. Creating a new OS inside of IBM would require a massive engineering effort.
followed by
We chose Linux because it's open and....saw considerable advantage in using an operating system supported by the open-source community, so that we can get their input and feedback."
So, basically, IBM doesn't want to design their own proprietary system (smart) and plans to use the resources currently available. (also smart)
They want open-source to get them rich, right? Less initial cost by the company, etc etc. What are the odds they'll profit-share with people they're getting rich off of? (well, ok, attempting)
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
Face it. If they could make more money selling NT, they would. If the BSDs had the media appeal that Linux has, they would have run a "Peace, Love and BSD" campaign.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Oh the Havoc The Blue Gin will reap on Major Nelson, genie, and poor old Dr. Bellos!
Oh, wait...
davejenkins.com |
This machine can help calculate how I can get a chick.
m atebb.cgi
Osiris
http://www.askheartbeat.com/cgibin/ulti
(I was readin' dis site while behind bars, its mega cool man!)
i speak of none but the computer which will become after this one...
65k? That more linux CPUs than on all desktops. Now if only the average Joe and Mary could use it.
wait until the mice (actually hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings) start building earth.. now that will be a computer.. including nuke tests and weather!
if ibm is going to back this (linux) then it's gonna be a super blow to microsoft and linux will finally come to the masses with ibm helping them. (instead of microsoft with ibm. i'd bet ibm isin't too fond of them myself).
so the whole world is finally comming together in software (and they have hardware backing them aswell as the countries moving to them aswell). this is great news.
perhaps information is meant to be free to the hard working ibm's of the world that take advantage of it's obvious advantages.
the market is now changing over to open-source.
score one for the good guy. (evilsoft and it's monopolistic ways are on their way out.)
you have to give what your customer wants regardless what is it. they ultimatly pay for the product (or build it themselves b/c things aren't what they want).
linux is a great niche market. i'm sure they'll make microsoft look small compared to when they are finally lesser then something that takes them out.
bluetiger50microsoft@yahoo.ca
(remove microsoft to email me and to have a good day)
Yahoo! News Version
IBM Chooses Linux for 'Blue Gene' Supercomputer
IBM has chosen the open source Linux operating system to run on one of its largest, most powerful supercomputing projects, dubbed "Blue Gene."
The petaflop computer, which can calculate 1 quadrillion operations per second, is 100 times more powerful than the fastest computers available, according to IBM.
ZDNet UK
Linux will power IBM supercomputer project
The upcoming family of 'Blue Gene' supercomputers will run on an extended form of Linux, a major endorsement for the open source operating system
Linux will be the main operating system for IBM's upcoming family of "Blue Gene" supercomputers -- a major endorsement for the operating system and the open-source computing model it represents.
OS Opinion
IBM Chooses Linux for 'Blue Gene' Supercomputer
Another supercomputer in the same family, Blue Gene/L, is also set to run Linux. IBM has said Blue Gene/L will be at least 15 times faster than today's fastest supercomputers.
See Complete Story
The Blue Gene project, first announced in late 1999, was designed to model the folding of human proteins, allowing researchers to better understand diseases and their cures. At the time, IBM said Blue Gene would be 1,000 times more powerful than "Deep Blue," the computer that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Global Thermonuclear XBill
And it still won't render more than 100 FPS on Unreal Tournament. Ah well...
Thomas Galvin
And there I was thinking it was to calculate how proteins fold... I wonder if its got enough power to do it?
keeping physical nuclear weapons seems so 90s. Just have the computer run the tests and keep the ingredients for instant construction when the 'need' arises from his pants. that is the pants of any president and/or dictator with or without a moustache.
Personally, I think people use linux over Windows because it is a much more intelligent operating system. Regardless of where it came from, it is easier to do complicated tasks, request and shortly download bug fixes or new features, and develop software under Linux (For most people. In my opinion. Bah Whatever I love linux and windows is totally ridiculous. :) :)
The fact that it also has that "Free" appeal to it, not just Free as in $ but Free as in open and for the benefit of the users and no one else, isnt going to change just because IBM is making its own branch for its megacomputers and whatnot. Even if they come out with a desktop version that gains popularity, it wouldnt be mutally exclusive with Slackware and the rest of the gang. Those companies who liked linux for its robust working environment could now have that with the comfy blanket of legitimate IBM support, and those of us who dont want to pay for it, or dont want to give money to a supercorporation, could continue to use Slackware, etc. And if you really believe in the open source movement, you will trust the fact that software written For People will always be a better product than software written For Profit.
Why stick up for big business?
About nuclear testing: They probably do more than just determine the size of the hole we can make. They can also simulate things like the effects of fallout from a device detonated by that person you are less worried about.
s/fact/idea
One of these days I'll try that Preview button.
Why stick up for big business?
Nope.
So... you want people to use Linux or not? I don't feel bad when I load it up just because I haven't contributed a single line of code. Usually when there's an article here about some company or government deciding to use linux for something everyone is excited and thinks it's a good thing. Now IBM wants to use it for a massive computer and there's mostly negative comments.
Just another reason whey the 'Linux Community' will remain isolated just a little bit longer from the real world.
"Yes, but the computation would be so accurate that it would take the thrill out of finding your mate laven."
This is not just great news in the way it again validates GNU/Linux today, but also that IBM will be doing heavy research on the code for the next two years at least.
I only wish that as an aside they would port Notes and Suite to support the desktop as well.
The only time I've seen Linux mentioned on mainstrem TV is in IBM commercials. This is a Good Thing. (The fact that it's being featured in commericals, not the fact that these are the only mainstream media references to Linux)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I still hope they get decent coolers 'cuz we're now talking about 32 processors per chip ! Still, what an awesome design to increase the density & number of processors. I was wondering how they'd do it for 65,000. Now I know :)
Interesting question unfolding : will we ever get those chips on the desktop ? Imagine your own 32-way PC at home. Heh, who needs Beowulf clusters now !
Nice to have IBM scale Linux up to 64k CPUs! They gonna release it in GPL right?
just fucking die, will you?
Look at these previous Cray systems, and compare that to what we have now. Sure, 2GB of RAM was "Super-computer" territory in 1985, but today you can walk in and buy it for $200 at Best Buy.
16 trillion bytes? Why not just say 16 TB? It's a heck of a lot simpler, and there's no confusion between American and European interpretations of "trillion."
"IBM is the establishment, and if they use Linux, how am I going to stick it to the man?!@#"
The Blue Gene will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory.
That's a LOT of processors.
It's nice to see that some companies have kept the tradition of computers that fill a room or five. Maybe they can throw some vacuum tubes on for old time's sake.
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
I have heard this same discussion about 'alternative' music. As soon as a band becomes truly popular some original fans quit listening to them. However, a whole new audience ( read as more consumers) are now willing to listen and purchase their music. The same thing could happen to Linux if a company like IBM would take the OS, clean it up (where needed), offer a supported version for a reasonable price and provide a single point of contact for technical support. There would be some users who might say "now it is just another Windows" but there might also be a whole new audience of business and individual users who would see it as a legitimate alternative to Windows.
If I'll ever meet you, I'm going to kick your ass!
Exactly! As I see it, the only thing MS has on Linux is a marketing department. If promotion was all IBM did it would be enough. Keep going IBM!
But how many polygons will it render per second and does it run Quake3? ;)
Martin Piper
Owner - ReplicaNet and RNLobby
A beowu...*thawp*
Sorry.
Wow! Imagine a Beow SMACK!
They can not do the creative part of the design yet, so they use human slaves to create more advanced computers. I can literally feel it - chained to the workstation the whole day (sometimes more). Computers give us entertainment and some kind of social life, they are like drugs. In exchange, they require total devotion and take our health.
That's a curious number. Because it's about the amount of memory needed to perform the matrix operation involved in using the Number Field Sieve to factor a 1024-bit number. It would still take a (long) while to do, but given enough time, this machine could do it.
Try to calm down, O.K.?
Data has a maximum storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits - all in that little head of his! :-)
z
Isn't 16 trillion bytes about 14.551915228366851806640625 TB?
See, we use this not only to simulate the weapons but also to simulate the actual attacks. Then our computer and the enemy computer can link up and calculate the damage. And if you live in a city that was eNuked, you would go to the molecular deconstruction booths. The we wouldn't have a nuclear winter, which would suck. The when Kirk shows up, we grab him and duct tape his freaking mouth shut, and we won't let Spock get behind us to pinch our shoulders. This could work.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Cmon people. lets give ourselves a break. I mean how long we are going to dvelve into treating LINUX as a underdog!!? Its now a "main" stream system and is here to stay. Are we ever going to get over this wide-eyed response to every news relating to it!!!
;-)
If you are wondering.. i use DEBIAN at work and SUSE at home. Does that qualify me to be made some kinda saint/prophet in some kinda geek religion?
Heck, linux is not the 11th commandment and Linus didnot bring the first ten either!!
Voltaire: God is dead.
God: Voltaire is dead!
Conventional wisdom, sometimes called Amdahl's second law of computing, says you need as many bytes as flops, i.e. a one second main memory buffer. This computer only has 1/60 sufficient memory- 16 terabytes for one petaflop. Anything that involves serious dataprocessing, e.g. sensor signals, won't run at top speed due to the seriousmemory deficiency.
> The Blue Gene will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory." ... and Gnome and Kde will still run like a depressed slug on valium.
With the standard "worlds largest computer" binaries installed. Its on the 10th CD that they paste into the box so you have to cut it open with a knife.
They haven't got any one who has bought the 7.2 CDs yet and they don't have a CD-R to use the downloaded ISOs, so its just plain 6.0 but they are using a KDE desktop.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
A Salesman once stated in all seriousness that using the AIX S/80 64Way I could have 128 concurrent Quake users, this meant getting 128 graphics cards but it could be done.
:-)
Now we know how they test them
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
maybe somebody should tell big blue
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
They didn't put the NEC Earth Simulator on their graph, which at 40 tflops peak is above the line.
Imagine a beowulf cluster... ...oh wait.
It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims. -Aristotle
Will it be able to count up to 42 ?
I bet we could support a few more users on our 5250 green screen apps with Blue Genes on!
It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims. -Aristotle
Yeah but open source means those die hard fans can just fork their own geek version of the band. And let IBM play their mainstream crap, with 2.5 minute radio edits. How cool would it be if you could do that with your favourite bands. Maybe I could still be hearing new stuff from the Sneaker Pimps with Kelli Dayton singing.
So if the research of IBM is included in what we consider 'Linux' (but not necessarily included in the stock kernel), I guess the argument could be made that Linux scales better to a large number of processors than any other operating system.
Of course there are these controversial tests about low-end systems with just a handful of processors, but we can consider that the noise margin.
see a Text Widget
and yes i realize that it's for million and not mega (or milli), as well as the fact that it's ironic to see this coming from a guy who doesn't like to capitalize
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
First installment may be better. I believe they are currently contracted to install four of these refridgerator sized units having a total of 64000 processors. Prototype implies they will modify the design and build the final installation of 64 racks out of a new improved design. I don't think this is the case. Instead, they will simply add the remaining racks. Also, I believe this machine is specifically designed to work on the problem of protien folding. I'm not sure what that means in terms of its general purpose capabilities, but I believe it will be optimized for the protien folding task. Finally, this is supposed to be the first computer capable of a PetaFLOP. Seeing as the final machine will have 1 million processors, this seems much less impressive (1 GigaFLOP times 1 million) A GigaFLOP per processor doesn't seem all that impressive. FLOPs doesn't seem to capture the speed of a massively parallel computer all that well.
It's also a lot of Frames Per Second in Quake!
linooks has such bad kernel code that any such computer is doomed from the beginning.
who wants a shell on that ?? I know i do ! :o)
The Yahoo version has more quotes and info from the IBM managers closest to the project...
If SPARC is to survive, someone outside Sun will have to make it so. After the development of the original UltraSPARC, many (most?) of the talent that made it happen went bye-bye. There's been an ongoing brain drain from the design groups since then. Some people who used to be thought of as a waste of air are now considered top contributors.
In the meantime, successor projects (to UltraSPARC) have spent too much time redesigning and precious little time getting a competitive product out the door.
The performance of the software running on my server farm's fastest Intel/AMD machines is far superior to the performance of the same products running on the fastest SPARC boxes. On the other hand, every SPARC box we've ever purchased is still running in some capacity. I can't say that for the PC-platform servers.
I'd like to see Sun get its in-house design process straightened away and become competitive again. But somebody high up is going to have to take ownership of that process and make some major changes if it's going to happen, IMO. And since things have languished this long, it's hard to figure how somebody's going to wake up at this late date and put full effort into fixing what's gone wrong. I sure hope it happens, for some of the same reasons you shared!
Anybody got 65000 AOL disks?
Apparently you haven't read the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy (...er quintology...whatever) or if you have, you failed to make the connection before you posted. Either way, we'll be by later on this evening to confiscate your Geek ID.
Oh, and please have any Geek-Items* that you may own packaged up for us.
We'll leave you with an E-machine, and the First Season of friends on DVD**.
* Geek-Items include but are not limited to: any computer faster than a Pentium II, PDA's, TIVO's, gaming systems, any and all items sold on thinkgeek.com, MP3 players, any taped/DVD episodes of the following programs: X-files, Simpsons, Futurama, Doctor Who, Babylon 5, any Star Trek (or any Star Trek rip off), all anime or porn, any and all spare HD's, monitors, cdrom rom drives, or any and all items that at the discretion of the investigating officer could allow you to pass yourself off to the uninitiated as a geek.
** Geek-Items shall also include DVD players.
A doubter such as yourself deserves to be burned at the stake. Remove the Holy Debian from your pitiful box, you dirty the very idea and soul of the Debian project with your blashphemous ways.
Linus did bring us the ten commandements from Finland. When god finished with the earth's creation on the seventh day, he let his favorite son Linus Torvalds get a crack at creating a little piece of the world and thus he spoke,
"Let there be Linux!".
To free the Penguins from the ravages of polar bears, Linus parted the Atlantic Ocean ("Hear that Moses? The entire fucking atlantic ocean beat that!")and led them on a long odyssey from pole to pole to the penguins promised land. This all went down around 1992.
Do not speak to me about what should and shouldn't be said blashphemer. Your ways are the in the wrong and I for one shall not listen.
>
user: Let's play global thermonuclear war.
blue gene: How about a nice game of chess?
Vote for Pedro
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
1 million processors+, to simulate folding a measly protein? Yikes.
The protein itself "calulates" how it should fold in nanoseconds, using a "hardware" consting of a couple of thousand atoms. I guess this is why we should push for quantum computers.
Side note: I once read about a proposed method of factoring large primes which involved transforming the prime into a protein sequence, and getting the factors by letting the protein fold. This is based on the fact that any instance of a NP-hard problem can be transformed into an instance of any other NP-hard problem in polynomial time (protein folding and prime cracking are both NP-hard).
Abuse me if the above paragraph made no sense. Long time no complexity theory.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
The news.com articles make different claims as to how many processors the final machine will have. The first article claims 65,000 processors. The second article claims over a million, packed 32 CPUs per die. My calculator is usually right so one of the stories is wrong, probably the first one. I just don't see where they obtained the 65,000 number.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Sorry, had to be done ...
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
Wow. That's a lot of nuclear weapons simulations.
It's going to fold protiens.
Apparently this will also be the first base 10 computer system. Way to go IBM!
If IBM would use BSD over Linux and use the BSD licence no one would complain. So why does IBM use linux and thereby upsets 30% of the /. readers?
Is there an x86 based machine that can outperform, say, a Sun Enterprise 15k?
It seems to be the ideal system to run the next Microsoft operating system.
But think how much it would cost for the 65,000 licenses.
Not to mention the network time to activate them all.
Then heaven help them if they add a peripheral, say just before a high-profile chess match, and need to REactivate them all.
Now if the mean time to failure of a MS system gets up to, say, 30 days, and you have 65,000+ processors, that's a mean time to failure of about 40 seconds. It would be 2167 reboots per day if a reboot didn't take more than 40 seconds. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Blue Gene is NOT a shared-memory computer -- with a single kernel running all 64k processors -- but rather a cluster of 32k seperate computers (with two processors), each on one chip.
Looks like someone already imagined a Beowulf Cluster.
I guess now we have to imagine a Beowulf Cluster of Beowulf Clusters to imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these.
The mind boggles.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If this had been designed as a Windows server...
1) What would it cost to license 64K processors for use by 256K users?
2) Would you ever get the whole damn thing to run at one time? (round robin reboots?)
3) How secure would it be?
4) How many "buffer overrun" exploits would it have?
I think you catch my drift...
It is now time to flip off your computer.
Linux is like my wife, hard to understand but very nice once you get under the hood.
:D
Not because it's free and open to everyone, then?
Kidding.. sorry dude, couldn't resist
I imagined it! It was really cool.
I know this is bit of a streach but... Is there any chance your name is George W. Bush?
IBM is not getting the message. May be that's why we can't find another place like earth yet. We have not build the "Deep Though" to create one. May be Blue Gene will.
says you need as many bytes as flops
In the associated research papers not all the cpus are doing computation. Some of them are speeding part time doing messaging duties. So it a closer back of the envelope calculation to divide the number of processors in half. In addition, was the 16 terabytes for the 65,000 or 1,000,000 cpu version? Gene/L (65K) is about 180-360 TF so 16 TB isn't so bad. Each chip is 2.8-5.6 GF and 4MB. Thirdly, these are theoretical peak flops. Engaging all of the node;s FPUs isn't possible except for artificial problems.
Finally, one of the objectives here is "power" efficiency. The "main memory" access is non-linear.( saves in power/complexity). If the data isn't partitioned correctly performance is going to be bad. So in short, they only need to meet Amdahl's second law for the local data. For the non local data Amdahl's law is toast anyway.
[ They have flexibility to adjust a bit how much
memory is on each board.... so if Gene\L sucks... the final version can be tweaked. ]
Personally, I consider supercomputers "super" when their "everyday performance" flops are very close to the "peak" flop number. Otherwise what you have is more of a "supercluster" than a "supercomputer". There is a difference and it does matter for many (but not all) computations.
When it's ready, could someone post a dmesg somewhere? :)
1 petaflop, fuck nuclear sims. lets make a ray tracer work in real time!! can u say 3d gaming revolution?