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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?
That's a lot of nuclear weapons simulations.
RTFA. That's a lot of protein fold simulations.
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
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
I think we should not to be too cynical.
At least the decission that IBM has take will give a good campaign about the use of Open Source Software. It's better than any other big company decission who doesn't support the Open Source Software.
I think, the Open Source Software will not get any improvement if the people behind them always always get big suspiciousness over the other.
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so many dreams r swinging out of the blue we let them come true (forever young, alphavile)
Porting or developing their own projects -- JFS is an often pointed to as an example
Sponsoring developers of Open Source projects -- I know at least one KDE developer that was paid to write a series of tutorials on KParts that were published on IBM's web site . I recently saw something by the founder of Gentoo Linux as well.
Public Relations -- This is the big one. IBM lends Open Source and Linux more credability than any other company. They throw more resources into promoting Linu x than any other company. At a time where most major tech companies are at the most passively supporting Linux, IBM is very actively promoting it, and it's the reason that a lot of other major players are paying attention to Linux
Again, you can't underestimate the effects that having IBM backing Linux has in a corporate environment. Intel and AMD are paying attention because of IBM, and I'd be that a lot of a big part of why MS has taken note of Linux lately is that competing with Linux means competing with IBM.
So yes, they're contributing back, but the most significant ways are not the conventional methods. They're in fact contributing something to Linux that no number of hackers can -- credibility.
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.
Nice to have IBM scale Linux up to 64k CPUs! They gonna release it in GPL right?
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."
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.
Imagine, fighting against 8000 bots each controlled by 8 processors.
Factoring in processor speed, that makes each bot at least 2 times more clever than the machine that recently gained a draw in chess against kramnik.
Wow
Um. Isn't this one of the tenets of free software--it's not just free as in speech, it's also free as in beer.
The OSS movement (if such a 'herding cats' endeavour can truly be said to exist) should be welcoming this. One of the world's premier supercomputing projects is adopting Linux. Now you can say to CEOs, "Remember how nobody ever went wrong buying IBM? Well, now IBM is sinking $100 million into a Linux supercomputer. So yeah, we can build your corporate network. By the way, we don't have to charge you for software, either."
IBM has already been pushing Linux for enterprise solutions. It occurs to me that (just maybe) they might already be making significant contributions to Linux, both in terms of code improvements and indirect public relations benefits.
What more do you want them to do in terms of profit sharing? Mail a dollar bill to everyone that's written code for a Linux distro?
~Idarubicin
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.
Programmers on this level face entirely different challenges, such as optimizing a 65 thousand thread program so that CPUs aren't idle 90% of the time waiting for others. This is going to output some high quality specialized kernel code that about 10 or 20 computers around the world would find helpful performance-wise. Any desktop or server for mere mortals won't see much improvement.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
Right.
Remember that symbiosis is really mutual parasitism. From the entire system, both gain. IBM is *not* an "open-source" company, but they recognize the value and have dumped money into Linux. Oddly enough, IBM seems to be the main one actually profiting from Linux, and I can't imagine that was the original intention. IBM can dump money into Linux, never see a red cent direct result, and come out smelling like a rose.
64,000 processors and $100 million do give a pretty strong indication that Linux is enterprise-ready.
I wouldn't worry about the big suspiciousness. They're the ones "watching the watchers". They're also why I would tend to trust Open Source even if it were of inferior quality.
I think you are forgetting that while tuning Linux for such a large system, they are contributing to it as well. I have seen posts by IBMers to the LKML.
Let IBM profit, it can only help. The more they make, the more they will contribute.
Holy s-, it's Jesus!
Nothing wrong with AIX. It's a top-flight Unix-style system. For performance, reliability and *ease of administration* I would currently choose it over Linux most every time if cost is not an issue. I suspect in around three years time I will not be alone in choosing Linux every time though, and AIX, along with Solaris, will gradually fade away over the next ten years.