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

How many apples is that?

[goombah99]

Wow 650,000 processors. what's that in equivalent g5 flops, say 4000 or so :-P

kidding aside, are these based on the novel IBM design for having small clusters of wimpy processors sharing sections of memory. The concept being to have each processor running slowly, almost stalled waiting on a memory fetch. (while seeming stupid at first glance, its really diabolically clever since now you can junk all the long pipelines and branch prediction stuff: every single byte that comes from memory will be used by some CPU requesting it, thus you minimize the memmory buss buttle neck that is, ultimately, the limit on most processing).

if this is that design then that 65,000 processors indeed may not be quite as much computing horespower as it sounds. it might indeed be comparable to a smaller handful of G5s.

or maybe i'm full of crap.

Nuclear Weapons

[jonhuang]

Somewhere, there's an open source developer who's just realized that his work is being used to the development of nuclear weapons. All jokes about derivative works aside, I think it's a good time to consider the implications of this.