Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
f6risth p4osthle
Convicted Corporations Receive Perks Instead of Punishment
Sources:
ASHEVILLE GLOBAL REPORT, No. 183, July 18-24, 2002
Title: "Corrupt Corporations Still at Work in Developing World"
Author: Emad Mekay
MOTHER JONES, May/June 2002
Title: "Unjust Rewards"
Author: Ken Silverstein
Faculty Evaluator: Laurie Dawson Ph.D., Diana Grant Ph.D.
Student Researcher: Lindsey Brage, Terri Freedman
American energy giant, Enron, and telecommunications company, WorldCom, committed massive corporate fraud and illegal acts. Declaring bankruptcy in December 2001, they left thousands of American workers jobless and without pensions. The Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. and Corpwatch, a multinational watchdog group, has uncovered evidence of bribery scandals, environmental degradation and violations of international and labor laws. Yet Enron still has 25% interest in a Bolivian oil company called Transredes. Working with Shell Oil, the company is building a pipeline through Bolivia's Chaco Forest region, an area internationally known for its biodiversity, endangered species and the ancestral homeland of the indigenous Guarani and Guianeck peoples. In December 2002, Transredes was granted $220 million in loans from the International Development Bank, to be backed by U.S. taxpayer dollars.
Enron was also responsible for cutting down the last intact, dry tropical forest in the world, Bolivia's 15-million acre Chiquitano Forest, for another gas pipeline. The Chiquitano Forest was home to the endangered marsh deer, maned wolf, jaguar, ocelot and the hyacinth macaw. The World Wildlife Fund ranked the area one of the world's 200 most endangered eco-regions. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), during the Clinton administration in 1999, approved loans for Enron's pipeline, which could have skirted the forest at an additional expense to the company. Officially, OPIC is mandated to protect ecologically sensitive areas.
WorldCom still profits from its extensive telephone and internet networks throughout Latin American, Asia, Europe and Africa. Enron has additional business interests throughout Central and South America. In northwest India a power plant, which they co-own with Bechtel and General Electric, is so controversial that Enron officials face threats of being arrested on the spot if they enter the country. According to Nadia Martinez of the Institute for Policy Studies, "Enron and WorldCom are just symptoms of the way companies are able to do business without accountability."
In 2000, Clinton issued an order that provide clear guidelines regarding the awarding of federal contracts. The new "contractor responsibility rule" specified that federal officers should weigh "evidence of repeated, pervasive or significant violations of the law," for example cheating on prior contracts, violating environmental and safety laws, labor rights, consumer protection laws, and antitrust activities. President Bush quietly killed the rule requiring officials to ban federal contractors with a record of violations of workplace safety and other laws.
The Congressional Research Service issued an opinion concluding that the secret suspension of the rule (no issuing of public notice or soliciting of comments) was probably illegal, but the move went virtually unreported in the media. The government does not maintain a central database to store information on contractors' records of compliance with the law. The EPA and OSHA maintain their own lists of corporate violations, but parent companies are not always linked to their subsidiaries. "There's no process built into the review system," says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB watch, a Washington-based advocate of government accountability.
A six-month investigation by Mother Jones of the nation's 200 largest contractors found that the government continues to award lucrative contracts to dozens of companies that it has repeatedly cited for serious workplace and environmental violations. Among the findin
He walked down the dark stone corridor of the castle's underground chambers. The torch in his hand was the only light source. It was cold and damp. He shivered with cold and fear. He had to find her and kill her before the sun had set. He had barely an hour before it set now.
He came upon the heavy wooden and steel door. It was locked from the inside. He knew that her rest chamber must be on the other side. He drew a heavy steel chisel from his belt and drove it into the wood around the lock with the heavy hammer he carried. The wood was hard and it required a tremendous effort to break away such a small piece of the door. He had to work faster or he would be doomed.
As he worked on the door, he remembered the first time he had seen her. The dark mysterious woman was so beautiful. Her heavy black satin cloak with a slight trimming of red outlining her face had hidden most of her from view. But those eyes and those lips were not hidden. Such deep, dark, beautiful eyes. They stole a man's very soul as he looked at them. And her mouth. Those full, deep red, luscious lips. The way they pouted and begged to be kissed. It was no wonder no man had resisted her. She had said only, "Come to me," to his friend that night. His friend had left with her a moment later amid catcalls from all the others about getting laid. They had never seen him again, alive. And the others, there had been six more. He knew. That was why he was here to stop her.
The lock was barely holding now. He had a mere twenty minutes before sunset. He drew back the hammer and hit the door with all his might. The wood splintered, the lock skidded across the stones at his feet and the door opened a few inches. He pushed the door open further and found a lighted chamber on the other side.
The walls were draped in flowing coverings of red satin. Torches burned brightly in several spots. The floor was covered with an ancient Persian rug. In the center of the floor was a long wooden chest.
He moved to the chest and inspected it. There were no locks to break. He took hold of the lid and raised it. It was heavy but his strong arms could easily handle it. It fell open on the other side of the chest. Inside was an oblong bundle wrapped in black silk. Each of the four sides of the chest were on hinges with releases on the inside. He unlatched the releases and the sides fell open. The bundle was now fully accessible and resting on a cushion covered in the same black silk. He raised up the hammed and drew the long oak stake from his belt. He placed the point against the center of the bundle and prepared to drive deep into the bundle. But he couldn't. He had to be sure he struck the heart or he would be doomed. The only way was to draw back the silk covering.
He mustered his courage and strength. He grabbed hold of the soft sensuous material and pulled it away. The sound of the silk slipping against itself was soothing and yet, unsettling at the same time. Each of the folds of material now slid from the form it covered as if a package was unwrapping itself. When the last fold fell away, she lay uncovered before him.
He stared at her. He had never seen her like this before. Never without her black cloak. She lay sleeping. She was so very beautiful. Her lips were full and red, as if painted with blood. Her skin was soft and glowing. She had long, very dark, curly, flowing hair that looked like delicate silk threads. Her breasts were huge and voluptuous, bursting from her gown with its low cut front. Her breasts called to him and invited his caresses. Her dress was red satin and form fitting. Her figure was so enticing with its well defined curves. There was a generous slit up side of the dress that left one leg in plane view. Her legs were long and shapely. They were so sexy in their black lace stockings that ended at mid-thigh. Her black leather shoes with their four inch spike heels were the perfect end to her alluring legs. The contrast of her white skin, black stockings and red dress was hypnotic.
He checked hi
Well, it may be able to play Doom3 when it is released.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance
Sources:
The Sunday Herald
September 15, 2002
Title: "Bush Planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President"
Author: Neil Mackay
Harper's Magazine
October 2002
Title: "Dick Cheney's Song of America"
Author: David Armstrong
Mother Jones
March 2003
Title: "The 30 Year Itch"
Author: Robert Dreyfuss
Pilger.com
December 12, 2002
Title: "Hidden Agendas"
Author: John Pilger
Random Lengths News
October 4, 2002
Title: "Iraq Attack-The Aims and Origins of Bush's Plans"
Author: Paul Rosenberg
Project Censored wishes to acknowledge that Jim Lobe, the Washington, D.C. correspondent for Inter Press Service (IPS), has been covering the ways in which neo-conservatives, using the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) among other mechanisms, used the 9/11 attacks to pursue their own agenda of global dominance and reshaping the Middle East virtually from the outset of the Bush administration's "war on terrorism." For more information, please vist the following link: http://www.ipsnews.net/focus/neo-cons/index.asp
Faculty Evaluators: Phil Beard Ph.D. and Tom Lough Ph.D.
Student Researcher: Dylan Citrin Cummins
Corporate Media Partial Coverage:
Atlantic Journal Constitution, 9/29/02, The President's Real goal in Iraq, By Jay Bookman
Over the last year corporate media have made much of Saddam Hussein and his stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Rarely did the press or, especially, television address the possibility that larger strategies might also have driven the decision to invade Iraq. Broad political strategies regarding foreign policy do indeed exist and are part of the public record. The following is a summary of the current strategies that have formed over the last 30 years; strategies that eclipse the pursuit of oil and that preceded Hussein's rise to power:
In the 1970s, the United States and the Middle East were embroiled in a tug-of-war over oil. At the time, American military presence in the Gulf was fairly insignificant and the prospect of seizing control of Arab oil fields by force was pretty unattainable. Still, the idea of this level of dominance was very attractive to a group of hard-line, pro-military Washington insiders that included both Democrats and Republicans. Eventually labeled "neoconservatives," this circle of influential strategists played important roles in the Defense Departments of Ford, Reagan and Bush Sr., at conservative think tanks throughout the '80s and '90s, and today occupies several key posts in the White House, Pentagon, and State Department. Most principal among them are:
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, our current Vice-President and Defense Secretary respectively, who have been closely aligned since they served with the Ford administration in the 1970s;
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the key architect of the post-war reconstruction of Iraq;
Richard Perle, past-chairman and still-member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board that has great influence over foreign military policies;
William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and founder of the powerful, neo-conservative think-tank, Project for a New American Century.
In the 1970s, however, neither high-level politicos, nor the American people, shared the priorities of this small group of military strategists. In 1979 the Shah of Iran fell and U.S. political sway in the region was greatly jeopardized. In 1980, the Carter Doctrine declared the Gulf "a zone of U.S. influence." It warned (especially the Soviets) that any attempt to gain control of the Persian Gulf region would be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the U.S. and repelled by any means necessary, including military force. This was followed by the creation of the Rapid Deployment Force -- a military program specifically designed to rush several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf on short notice.
Under President Reagan, the Rapid Deployment For
...but can this computer actually run:
10 LET x = 1
20 LET y = 2
30 PRINT x + y
Now this would be impressing
The IT section color scheme sucks.
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?
Holly shit where do I buy on of thoes!
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.
If it's just a figure of speech, then I guess it's no big deal.
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
I quite enjoyed that, thanks. Better than the usual geek rubbish on Slashdot.
Last night I masturbated thinking of my ex-girlfriend -- except that she had no arms and legs. I had removed them and was raping her. Her helpless sobbing mingled with my orgasm.
Serves her right for cheating on me, I thought. But today I feel disgusted with myself. Is this wrong?
... can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
an 'imagine a beowulf cluster of these' post
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... ---
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
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
a Beowulf cluster of those?
(sorry, but someone had to say it)
{{.sig}}
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...
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!
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.