Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.'"

6 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Infinite by mOoZik · · Score: -1, Redundant

    If an infinite loop is infinite, how can it be finished?

    --
    A blog like any other.
  2. Whoaa... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    ... can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?

  3. i'm scared to post ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    an 'imagine a beowulf cluster of these' post

  4. In Soviet Russia... by The+Other+White+Meat · · Score: -1, Redundant

    ... a beowolf would cluster YOU!

    --

    --- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
  5. Can you imagine... by chrysalis · · Score: -1, Redundant

    a Beowulf cluster of those?

    (sorry, but someone had to say it)

    --
    {{.sig}}
  6. great by arctan1701 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    wait till SCO hears about this...