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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.
to be displayed in the Framebuffer at startup...
See my blog for my free opinions.
It'll be Redhat, 6 point something. They found a set of the CDs lying around so they decided to use that.
Hopefully the fruits of this will feed through into the mainline kernel and so to other systems.
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.
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
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.
wait until the mice (actually hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings) start building earth.. now that will be a computer.. including nuke tests and weather!
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, this is a good thing because it didn't happen by monopilzation from one company. There is lot of diversity within Linux (lots of different vendors and supporters) but it's all compatible.
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
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.
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
To: Linus Torvalds
From: bob@ibm.com
Subject: kernel-smp patch, 65000 cpu's
Dear Linus,
Please accept this patch to accommodate thousands of processors in a single machine.
[attached: patch]
To: bob@ibm.com
From: Linus Torvalds
Subject: Re: kernel-smp patch, 65000 cpu's
No problem, Bob. Just go ahead and send me one of those machines for "testing" and then I'll merge the patch in...
Linus