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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.'"
It's gonna be 512 MB for BlueGene/L(ite) and 1Gb for proper BlueGene
I mean, per node :-)
AFAIK, 512 Mb is just too little for proper protein-folding calculations, while 1Gb provides enough capacity... And, of course, no swap is possible in this types of systems
No, It's a supercomputer. Those are RISC processors, a PPC 440 in reality gives better performance than a CISC processor like the PIII
Because they are used embedded DRAM, which although not as fast as SRAM it gives more storage in fewer transistors. This leads to a smaller die, and lower power/heat dissipation.
If your p1 runs at the same speed than your P4 for 90% of operations, then there is something wrong with your computer! The HDD is not the bottleneck for most modern computers, as they have enough memory to minimize page faults for most common home computing tasks.... Startup times however may be equal since both machines have to get the data/program from HDD... once stuffs are in memory, buubbie P1....
RISC vs. CISC is a moot point nowdays.
A PIII is as much a RISC processor under the hood as the PPC, but neither are pure RISC.
Pure RISC sucks, pure CISC sucks.