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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.
Hopefully the fruits of this will feed through into the mainline kernel and so to other systems.
There's A nice presentation[ibm.com] that describes the system quite well.
"Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will use the system for performing nuclear weapons simulations." I thought it was going to be used for protein folding simulations too.
I read the f'ing article and it says...
Unless nuclear weapons simulations is secret code for protien fold simulations, then I don't get it.
Speak truth to power.
They contribute plenty..one I use and thank them for is JFS, the journalling filesystem used by AIX. I have a question...I love Linux..use it everyday, but I ALSO love AIX..which I think is the superior commercial UNIX..what's wrong with using AIX?
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
IIRC, IBM contributed their Journaling File System.
That will only address the problem of inaccurate models. It will not decrease the problem of sensitivity to noise in the input data (the butterfly effect), which fundamentally limits the prediction to a week or so. To reduce the noise problem, we need more sensors all over the earth and the oceans.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
While they probably won't profit share, they'll likely share in other ways, by code improvements etc. IBM is investing heavily in linux and I'd assume they're looking at ways to improve linux to make it as stable as AIX is. They've already done work on integrating JFS into the kernel, for instance.
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?
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.
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 !
Building a computer, to tell you how to build another, larger, more complex computer. Hrmmm..
Uh, that's how it works in general. Or did you think modern CPUs were laid out by hand?
Of course not, it probably won't have a Linux-supported 3D card. If you want >100fps un Unreal 2003, get yourself a GeForce4 or Radeon 9700. It's a lot cheaper.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Hey I still use RH6.2, it's the last of the non-bloats redhat put out. RHL lost it's virginity after 6.2
Blue Gene is actually more like the architecture. The first machine in the family, Blue Gene/L which this announcement was about will be used for bomb simulation and have 65000 processors and about 200 teraflops performance. Later there will be another, simply called Blue Gene, with 1 million processors and an estimated 1 petaflops performance. You can think of Blue Gene/L has a prototype for the final one.
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 original Blue Gene (not "L") is for protein folding.
Once the national labs got wind of the idea they decided to build a smaller "test" version called Blue Gene/L that will be used by the labs for their own purposes.
I've been reading up on this as there is work at Caltech on BG/L.
Getting Linux to work on a machine with 65K processors is going to take considerable work, right now I think Linux's sweet-spot is 8 processors.
This IS NOT SMP!!!! This is Super Parallel Beowulf processing. Beowulf Linux already runs on LOTS of Super Computers. It will be a trivial thing for IBM to get this working on that many processors because it's more like a 65,000 node super computer.
Gorkman
I worked on a Cray-XMP, and I saw the logic design documents for the machine. They were not graphical symbols, but logic equations. A very thick line printer document of logic equations. Given the very low computing power of the pre-Macintosh machines, either a 6800 or 6502 8-bit CPU, it is not possible that the Cray was "designed" on a Apple. Perhaps Seymore Cray used it as a editor. It is true, however, that Apple bought a Cray and used it for design work. A friend of mine was the "Cray evagalist" at Apple, and he said that the Cray paid for itself by solving a physical design problem. They were having problems with the injection molding of the plasic cases, and they used a finite element code to make the injection molding work correctly. Not a sexy application, but it paid the rent. It was a lack of these "non-sexy" applications that killed Cray.