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.

Comments

Re:What distribution?

[stevelinton]

I think we can safely assume it will be their own very special system. The article says:

Tailoring Linux to run on these upcoming machines will require substantial research, according to IBM. The company has, for instance, created a technique where only select processors can access the full hardware resources of the machines. IBM is also looking at ways to reduce interference between different tasks.

Hopefully the fruits of this will feed through into the mainline kernel and so to other systems.

Lots more info

[stevelinton]

There's A nice presentation[ibm.com] that describes the system quite well.

Re:Not nukes

[spoonyfork]

I read the f'ing article and it says...

Blue Gene/L, the first member of the family, will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory. Due in 2004 or 2005, the system will be able to perform 200 trillion calculations per second. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will use the system for performing nuclear weapons simulations.

Unless nuclear weapons simulations is secret code for protien fold simulations, then I don't get it.

Re:contributions to OSS?

[xtremex]

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?

Re:Open source IBM

[larien]

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.

Variations on the same story

[randomErr]

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.

Coming soon: your own 32-way computer on a chip

[forged]

Actually, the original article has pretty good insights:

• Blue Gene will use 32 CPUs in a single chip, Goyal said. [...] These chips will contain the computer memory as well [...] A total of 64 of those 32-CPU chips will be packaged in a computing node; then eight nodes will be stacked in each rack. Building 64 of these racks will get IBM to its goal.

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 !

Re:Deep Thought?

[blancolioni]

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?

supercomputer crippled by small memory

[peter303]

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.