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More Details Of IBM's Blue Gene/L

Posted by timothy on from the not-yet-for-common-folk dept.

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.'"

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Re:4 MB DRAM by otis+wildflower · · Score: 5, Interesting

    4MB per CPU, each with 2 processing cores, and an onboard memory controller.

    Final version to have 65536 CPUs.

    Smells like 256GB to me, which is pretty decent in _any_ book, especially if it lives on the same silicon as the CPU...

  2. What's new? by LeoDV · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

    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 /. blurbs, so I'm asking, is it just a bigger supercomputer, or does it have any "real" innovations?

    1. Re:What's new? by javiercero · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well... Earth Simulator was bigger and faster... as was big mac. Every advance in computer design and fabrication has been about "bigger and faster." It may sound trivial to you, but that is because you got no idea about what is involved about making things "bigger and faster."

      What is significant about blue gene is that is some sort of compromise between off the shelf parts (PPC based Processing elements vs. the Earth Simulator SX based custom vector PEs), and efficient interconnection (plain crappy cluster like the Big mac with a better interconnect at multiple layers starting with dual cores per die).

      In the end it all leads to the same goal: tackling bigger problems faster. So it may sound trivial but there is a lot of research going into this baby.

    2. Re:What's new? by tigertiger · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Beowulf-style cluster are a big waste in terms of additional circuitry and hardware that you do not need in a supercomputer, from I/O busses to the power supply. Of course, since off-the-shelf components are so cheap, it is still cheaper to buy the stuff than to design your own tailor-made circuitry - up to a certain scale.

      That is where IBM tries to go: BlueGene's design is based on a system-on-a-chip - everything (except memory) is integrated on a single chip. In the long run, this allows them to build systems much larger than you could with a Beowulf. They are basically aiming for a system where you can easily add computing power by simply putting in a few more chips, and the thing will scale. They are doing the same thing for storage with this brick

      BlueGene is a also the first supercomputer marketed to the life sciences. It's interesting to see that it developed from a project at Columbia University called QCDOC for "Quantum Chromodynamics on-a-chip" which did research in computational high-energy physics, and QCDSP before, which used DSP processors to build a supercomputer about ten years ago. Both an instructive example how academic research in the long run becomes industrially relevant, and how science changes.