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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."
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)...? :)
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
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.
Oh the Havoc The Blue Gin will reap on Major Nelson, genie, and poor old Dr. Bellos!
Oh, wait...
davejenkins.com |
IIRC, IBM contributed their Journaling File System.
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!
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
you don't need a computer for this, just skip your pickup line "Do you read slashdot?" :)
who shot the cat in the hat to experiment is insane
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?
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.
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.
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?
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."
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
- the kernel
- Most of the Apache projects, Xerces and Xalan are almost entirely maintain by IBM employees
- KDE usability
And that's just places where I've seen IBM email addresses. They do a lot, especially in Apache, it's just very easy to forget as they don't trumpet it like some other companies do.
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.
Someone from IBM recently offered they host _and_ maintain a bugzilla database for the linux kernel.
That is a great service to offer.
How about here?
Intelligent Life on Earth
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.
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
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.
Probably they made a strategic decision to pump up Linux to further annoy Microsoft. It's all revenge for OS/2, and of course anything that hurts Microsoft at this point is good for IBM (not to mention the rest of the industry).
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
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
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.
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.
"Porting or developing their own projects -- JFS is an often pointed to as an example"
Also EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System).
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
IBM's a double edge sword. I went down to IBM's labs near Winchester, UK, last month. one of their selling points was that they registered hundereds of patents each year - I wonder how many are for "method to conduct [aincent buisness practise] in an online setting" or "method to use an unpatentable mathematical function to compress an image"?
Same thing. ;+)
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
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?
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
Why don't you stop worrying about other peoples unintentional mistakes and start on your own intentional shortcomings.
>
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.
>
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
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