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IBM Sets Supercomputer Speed Record

Posted by timothy on from the hi-gene dept.

T.Hobbes writes "IBM's BlueGene/L has set a new speed record at 36.01 TFlops, beating the Earth Simulator's 35.86 TFlops, according to internal IBM testing. 'This is notable because of the fixation everyone has had on the Earth Simulator,' said Dave Turek, I.B.M.'s vice president for the high-performance computing division. The AP story is here; the NY Times' story is here."

3 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I read all three articles but couldn't find... by BlurredOne · · Score: 5, Informative

    A quick Google search has netted the following: OS - Linux, HPK (High Performance Kernel) Complilers - Fortran95, C99, C++ Math Library - a subset of ESSL If you would like to read the article, it can be found at http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/bluegene/talks/ gupta.pdf

  2. Re:I read all three articles but couldn't find... by bhima · · Score: 5, Informative
    I've been facinated with this thing ever since I discovered it was using processors I could actually write assembly (and C) for. Each node is running an embedded linux kernel.

    Here's a bit more: each node has 2 cpus and 4 fpus, custom non-preemptive kernel

    application program has full control of all timing issues kernel and application share same address space

    kernel is memory protected

    kernel provides: program load / start / debug / termination file access all via message passing to IO nodes

    I could go on and on but it's all on Blue Gene's site http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/index.html

    I can't resist adding that GCC won't use the second FPU on each die...

    --
    Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
  3. Re:What interconnect technology are they using? by joib · · Score: 5, Informative


    Did they use infiniband? Or a proprietary interconnect, perhaps?

    Proprietary. Actually, it has 3 networks, one mesh network for point-to-point communication, one tree network for collective communication and a service network for disk i/o, control, health monitoring etc. The service network is ethernet IIRC, the other two are custom.