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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.
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
Second, the AIX roadmap goes out to at least 2007 (five year planning window). So don't be throwing away your SMIT knowledge quite yet. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't significant AIX work being done as far out as 2010.
IBM has at least us$20B in AIX and as a result it is very mature. They're putting nearly us$1B a year into Linux (JFS being just one wonderful thing ported). It will still be a while before they can bet the company on Linux. Do also keep in mind that AIX has at least a 15 year head start on Linux.
-- Multics
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.
What????
IBM have spent a fortune on raising the public profile of linux. Now, perhaps you're a software geek, but those positive articles about linux in the mainstream press don't come cheap. And those IBM Consultants selling linux to conservative financial data centres need a LOT of backing.
IBM are fighting a propaganda war with Microsoft. That eats millions very fast.
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.
In 5 years, there will be only Linux, BSD and Solaris - with BSD and Solaris being binary and source compatible to Linux. Linux has reunited Unix...
Linux will be the non-proprietary and completely open foundataion for the next generation of software. The UNIX philosophy is the common thread, where Solaris, Linux, and BSD will be differently-targeted implementations. Microsoft will be playing catch-up in this new era.
I also hope that the portability of Linux will keep fueling the intense competition among hardware vendors. For one, I don't want the RISC architectures, such as SPARC, PowerPC, and MIPS, to go away. SPARC, for example, is a completely open standard with only a $99 license fee for new implementations. If there is any safe-haven from Intel, AMD, and Palladium, SPARC might be it. These architectures need to be commoditized further to head off any complete domination by x86. They simply cannot be marginalized out of existence by Intel.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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.