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More Details Of IBM's Blue Gene/L
Bob Plankers writes "By now we've all heard about IBM's Blue Gene/L, LLNL's remarkable new supercomputer which is intended to be the fastest supercomputer on Earth when done (360 TeraFLOPS). IBM has released some new photos of the prototype, and renditions of the final cluster. Note that the racks are angled in order to permit hot air to escape vertically and reduce the need for powered cooling. The machine uses custom CPUs with dual PowerPC 440 processing cores, four FPUs (two per core), five network controllers, 4 MB of DRAM, and a memory controller onboard. The prototype has 512 CPUs running at 700 MHz, and when finished the entire machine will have 65536 dual-core CPUs running at 1 GHz or more. Stephen Shankland's ZDnet article also mentions that the system runs Linux, but not on everything: 'Linux actually resides on only a comparatively small number of processors; the bulk of the chips run a stripped-down operating system that lets it carry out the instructions of the Linux nodes.'"
Well, it may be able to play Doom3 when it is released.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
no matter how many cpu's it will get. Maybe its better to invest time and resources in the David Deutsch research of quantum machines? http://www.qubit.org/people/david/David.html
I'm really impressed with this computer. I think it's going to be the first computer that can finish an infinite loop in under an hour.
- A
... the title says its a dupe.
/.!!
Way to go
This will be sure to boost the effeciency of travelling salesmen everywhere.
... those were the times. Ahhh, memories!
Why not more powerful CPUs? a 440 is hardly any kind of workhorse. A G4 at that speed would be too hot, but since PIII machines can run with just a small passive heatsink now wouldn't that have been a much better choice?
...but can this computer actually run:
:P
10 LET x = 1
20 LET y = 2
30 PRINT x + y
This seems to be a "does it run Linux?" joke gone horribly wrong.
Or is that kernel code you're posting?
Holly shit where do I buy on of thoes!
Or is that kernel code you're posting? :P
I sure hope he's paid the royalties to SCO, then.
Woah, this is the first time I think a box with 512 CPUs at 700 Mhz each one is crap.
Diego Rey
diegoT
It's gonna be 512 MB for BlueGene/L(ite) and 1Gb for proper BlueGene
I think I wet my pants.
A blog like any other.
nope, it runs Linux!
As a reply ;)
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Yea, I just hope it won't do:
PRINT X+X
or
PRINT Y+Y
and come out with a meaningful answer. Ick! That would just be wrong. But then again, I hope that it will never run a BASIC interpreter either
Answer: sortof.
So, you mean they're going to build a computer that's going to be bigger, faster and with higher number stats than the current #1? Shocking!
/. blurbs, so I'm asking, is it just a bigger supercomputer, or does it have any "real" innovations?
Sorry about the sarcasm, I'm only asking to be proven wrong, but isn't Blue Gene just more of the same, only bigger? Big Mac was interesting because of how cheap it was and because it was the first of its kind to use Macs, the Earth Simulator was interesting because it brought back custom chips for supercomputing as opposed to off the shelf components, we've been reading about IBM's dishwasher-sized supercomputer, articles about efficient supercomputing, so what's new about Blue Gene, besides being newer and bigger?
Once again I'm not bashing, I haven't read much of anything but the
This has nothing to do with Linux. This joke is much more crass. Think about it. Genes make chromozones. What happens when you put X and Y chromozones together. (Hint: storks with packages) Now, if a computer really could do that it would be amazing -- and slightly unsettling.
The standard of trolling has certainly fallen recently. Where's the SCO licence fee estimate for the finished 65536 processor SMP unit? You got a better class of idiot in those days... ;o)
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
If you actually look at the picture, closely, you will see that the racks themselves are NOT angled to reduce active cooling.
At the left side of the row of racks, there is an angled cover, which is either decorative, or being used to force cold air down the row of racks. Likely, its just decorative, and the cold air is being forced up from the raised flooring below.
Just like it is in every other enterprise-grade computer room...
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Yes. The thought of a creature with two X chromosomes is horrifying.
compile and link with:
gcc -g -o test test.c
run:
Infinite loop test
executed in 3.888419 seconds
There's a box in the background of this picture which has written on it "IBM Confidential trash".
I guess corporate espionage is quite real for these guys.
What's big about BlueGene/L is that it's small. That 512 processor prototype they mention in this article is the Dishwasher-sized computer you heard about.
BlueGene/L is about driving down the cost of supercomputing, not only in terms of money spent on hardware, but in terms of space, cooling, and maintanance, while at the same time improving scalability.
BlueGene/L is going to put 65,000+ processors in less space, using less power, and costing less, than many of todays >10,000 processor systems.
They do this with a minimalist approach, each processor is a SoaC (System on a Chip), with everything from the memory controller to internode networking to two cores and 4FPUs on the die, and the only other thing in a node besides the processors is a bit of RAM. This allows them to use much less power per node and gives them less heat per node to dissipate, which lets them pack the nodes much closer, which cuts down on internode latency, which increases scalability.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
The part of the article that I found most interesting was:
Linux actually resides on only a comparatively small number of processors; the bulk of the chips run a stripped-down operating system that lets it carry out the instructions of the Linux nodes.
The "stripped down operating system" must be the distribution nucleus on the compute-only subnodes, presumably something that allow the Linux nodes to distribute the code and I/O of computations to them and to query or control their state during debugging, and to reaccquire lost processor control.
It's only a matter of time before those of us who already have sizeable LANs at home will have embedded compute-only clusters within them too. Those would differ substantially from the typical Linux clustering for high availability. Instead of a non-Linux nucleus on those subnodes though, I'd prefer to see a pretty ordinary Linux kernel running slaved to remote masters.
Is anyone already playing with something like this in their Linux clusters?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Looking at the photographs, the entiere beast resides in 64 rack cases. With 42 units per case and 65536 CPU total, there are 24 CPUs per unit. Not bad :)
I can't imagine the overall heat of the thing.
{{.sig}}
wait till SCO hears about this...
Can you take your own question seriously?
This is a dense amount of processing power. Beowulf clusters aren't nearly this dense. Actually, if one were to create a "Beowulf cluster" of these, probably the Blue Genes would be attached to the Beowulf nodes, rather than being themself nodes. (I suspect that the controller for the Blue Gene is a bit specialized for controlling the Blue Gene.)
Attaching a Beowulf Cluster of these together would result in a computer that was significantly slower...but able to deal with larger problems if there was some automatic way of partitioning those problems so that they could be parcelled out. If there isn't, then most of the increased power would end up wasted...except on a rather limited class of problems that were simple enough and regular enough that they could be pre-factored. Many of these problems are quite important (protein folding is probably one of them), but they are a small subset of "all problems".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
huh. the guy who initiated and led the Blue Gene project in the beginning was Marc Snir. But then I believe some major fallout happened and it underwent major technical and managerial changes. oh well.
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
on a bunch of projects. Anybody get that list of projects that had to be split and alphabetized. Some of the projects seem a little silly and some seem to really have some really good uses to mankind. One of the things that made me laugh was to use it in computer virus research. I thought the internet was the biggest "viral research lab" around. How are you going to model that with a supercomputer? I may be spewing utter ignorance here however.
Got hosting
Bah.
Besides the fact that their Nikon D100 has a stuck (hot) pixel, the pictures of people (first "set" on the page) are really bad quality-wise and there is not much creativity - i.e. two shots of the same geek (Hall) taking heatsink temperatures from slightly different angles aren't exciting even to fellow geeks.
Other than that, keep up the great work IBM!
Must-not-watch TV!
Don't be silly, kernel code would be:
#include <linux/config.h>
#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/types.h>
MODULE_LICENCE("GPL");
__asmlinkage inline unsigned int add_x_plus_y(unsigned int x, unsigned int y){
unsigned int ret;
spin_lock_irq(¤t->arith->lock);
current->arith->accum = x;
current->arith->oprand = y;
__perform_add(¤t->arith);
ret = current->arith->accum;
spin_unlock_irq(¤t->arith->lock);
return ret;
}
I hear:
:)
Oh wow, another technical marvel
Oh Gee, another super computer...
Morons...
The whole point here, is that it makes the simulation
of folding a complete gene in about a years time.
If THAT doesn't bowl you over, don't post.
p.s. I can hear the rest of you "umm... so?" people and I can't help you. Sorry.
...If they ported over VMWare to run on this bad boy? Imagine the number of guest OS's you could run. This thing could be the data center of all data centers.
But otherwise, for all intents and purposes, its extremely proprietary and will ultimately run just a few specialized applications.
Never-the-less, with virtualized computing and beheamoth systems like these, the future of data centers is sure to change.
Goals are deceptive - the unaimed arrow never misses.
Maybe it's in part because I am currently studying these molecules but the movie is cool. It's got a nice cello background music and the resolution is well above average. I never thought watching a molecular simulation would make me feel that way.
er... With this power i want to crack some MD5 's !!!!! :)
Eduardo N. Fortes
If they need help for that, they can read an Douglas Adam's "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".
Now, Ken Wilson (=cool Nobelprize guy) who basically started this field, gave a famous estimate in a talk at a conference some time back, stating that to do a serious project in lattice QCD, one would need some (listen up now...) PetaFlopYears. Yes, imagine a computer being able to 1 PetaFlop/s running for one whole year nonstop. Another guy, Karl Janssen, said last year at the same annual conference, "yup, still true". So there is the requirement. Now, where is the machine?
From what I know, BlueGene is a direct decendant (sp?) of QCDSP (QCD on a DSP), a special purpose beast, built with IBM at Columbia Univ. to tackle, guess what, QCD. Its successor, soon to be rolled out, is QCDOC (= QCD on a chip), again together with IBM which is very close to the BG design. So all around cool IBM is using this know how and putting it to use for other research fields. If you're really interested, just google for QCDSP, QCDOC, lattice QCD, etc.
I don't know anything about protein folding or weather, but I can imagine, those guys are just as anxious to get some serious CPU in form of these monsters as the lattice guys.
As was pointed out above, "smaller" just means, you can cram more in one room and therefore have more CPU.
PS: not only do I think IBM is geeky-cool, I'm starting to admire their strategy: do worthwhile research with Academia, use know how, make into money, cf. Grid aka. IT as utility, BlueGene aka. Supercomputer in a box. awesome.