IBM's Blue Gene powered by Linux

bigjnsa500 writes "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. 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." Blue Gene has been announced for some time, but it's cool to see how it's shaping up.

Comments

Nuke simulations?

[gumpish]

Why are computers still being used for simulating nuclear weapons tests?

Are they trying to pack more megatons of destructive force into each warhead? Don't the major world governments have enough quantity to preclude the need for more powerful units?

Or are the tests run to design "safer" and/or more localized implementations? (Awww, looks like Big Brother has a soft spot after all...)

Re:Nuclear Weapons

[cgranade]

As opposed to if he charged for it, in which he would have just made blood money, and implicitly accepted the use of the technology. In this case, he/she can't say that s/he endorses the use, because they released the technology from their hands. To be sure, it is still disturbing, but not in the same way...

Re:How many apples is that?

[ocelotbob]

Uh, IBM makes the G5, or rather, the PPC970. I think they of all people would know whether or not the processor is suitable for the task at hand. Don't you agree?

What *I* Can't Wait For...

[philovivero]

When we get a supercomputer like this and the end of the article isn't "Some company will use this to find newer more efficient ways of killing people" but instead "Some university will use this to find ways of improving society at large."

I'm dreaming. I know.

Re:What *I* Can't Wait For...

[Copid]

Most of the supercomputers that people whine about because they support weapons development support a lot of other research as well. In fact, a lot less research would get done if we didn't have defense departments pissing away money on anything that might possibly have weapons potential.

Lots of wrothwhile stuff gets done on those machines, believe it or not. Just like lots of worthwhile stuff gets done at Lawrence Livermore Lab. They're famous for their weapons, but the amount of other research done there is staggering.

Re:How many apples is that?

[tychay]

You say:

The g5 supercomputer mentioned on slashdot before never performed what it originally claimed.

What was the claim? The only bogus claims I heard regarding the Terascale (G5 cluster) were:

1. Ignorant people taking Rpeak and multiplying by the number of machines and,
2. Wired taking an accurate claim of the clusters performance on 128 CPUs and extrapolating it to 2200. In the article, the manager of the top500 noted that the G5 cluster might take #3 and contend for #2.
3. A whole bunch of FUD from people like you who have some reason to wish the people working on this project ill simply because they chose Macs to do it.

Then a New York Times report using old data reported 7.1 teraflops Rmax--enough to put it at #3 on the old list and #4 on the new--NYT forgot to mention that there have since been three new clusters that made the top 10, one of which slightly edged out the Terascale.

Of course, by the time that was reported, the figure was revised to 8.3 Tflops and now, officially reported (both on the current Top500 and by the head of Terascale) as 9.555 Tflops (60% efficiency) with the stipulation they could probably get 10% more. A pretty umapproachable #3 spot in the Fall500 and the first sub-$100 million dollar system to break the 10 teraflop mark.

Go look at the current benchmarks, where are the Pentium clusters that are above it? Where are the Itanium clusters above it? Where are the Athlon clusters above it? Oh, I'm sure there will be some (probably in the Spring2004 500), but where are they all right now? How much do the current ones on the list cost (answer: no less than $30 million). Sounds to me the wishful-thinking, poor-reporting Wired and the Mac zealots were closer to the truth than FUD-meisters and the anti-Mac zealots.

The most efficient top 10 supercomputer right now is also the most powerful: The NEC EarthSimulator at about 80%. I'd imagine we should expect a 60-80% efficiency from the big budget Blue Gene/L. And in my book there is nothing wrong with the current 60% efficency of Terascale--anyway it probably says a lot more about how good Infiniband is than it does about how good the Mac is.

But the writing is on the wall. There is nothing special about the the 970 (G5), Virginia Tech could have done the same thing with an Opteron or Itanium2--it would have taken more processors and cost twice as much: ~$10 million best offer for the systems as opposed to $5.7 million list price paid for the Macs (subtracting $1.5 million for the Infiniband cards, routers, and cabling).

The take home point is not that they did it with Macs or Mac OS X instead of (your favorite CPU) and Linux. The take home point is: these guys built a top 10 supercomputer in a fraction of the time (months as opposed to years) at a fraction of the cost (<$10 million as opposed to >$100 million).

Yes, like the Crays of the old days (and today) there will always be those who need something like Blue Gene/L and IBM is happy to supply them. But a whole new generation of supercomputers will be built on-demand and out of commodity PC hardware and a good set of software running on an OS that doesn't charge for all the CALs. Right now the 970 is easily the best performer for LinPak. So much so, they can pay educational list price which included such worthless features as an Apple-tooled case, overpriced RAM, gigabit cards, and Radeon graphics cards, firewire, usb2.0, digital audio, iTunes and other iApps, and a OpenGL based desktop. Since the 970 is made by IBM, I'd hazard a guess that IBM would be happy to supply these people too. Whether they choose to run Linux, MacOS X, or something else.

Re:all well and good...

[Hektor_Troy]

Starting at 0, we'd have 65,535 monitors, which is the maximum value rendered by 16 places in base 2.

Okay, I could understand 'interesting' but 'insightfull'???

Here's a nice calculation for you.

What is 2 to the power of 16? 2^16. Try all kinds of calculators.
How many times would you multiply 2 with itself to end up with an odd number (which 65,535 is)? It is fairly difficult to end up with an odd number when doing 2^y where y is an integer > 0.

Now, 2^15 + 2^14 + 2^13 ... 2^0 would yield an odd number (because 2^0 is 1), and incidently it would give you 65,535.

I'm guessing the guy who taught the parent poster to count actually knew what he was doing ...