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IBM Provides Access to Blue Gene On Demand
neutron_p writes "IBM's world renowned Blue Gene supercomputing system, the most powerful supercomputer, is now available at new Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Center in Rochester, MN. The new Center will allow customers and partners, for the first time ever, to remotely access the Blue Gene system through a highly secure and dedicated Virtual Private Network and pay only for the amount of capacity reserved. Deep Computing Capacity on Demand will service new commercial markets, such as drug discovery and product design, simulation and animation, financial and weather modeling and also a number of customers in market segments that have traditionally not been able to effectively access a supercomputer at a price within their budgets.
The system enables customers to obtain a peak performance of 5.7 teraflops."
What's 5.7 teraflops in more familiar units? Like SETI@home workunits/day? By my calculations that's 1.5 workunits every second. Give or take. By comparison the entire SETI@home network is currently running at 67 teraflops.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
until all the Road Runner customers jump on it, and the bandwidth goes to hell. My three-d real-time animation of last week's blizzard with slow to a crawl, and then I'll probably get a pop-up advising me to switch to that other supercomputer the Japanese made last year.
Man, I hate when that happens.
I have to stop wasting so much time reading Slashdot. It's interfering with my crystal meth addiction.
I wonder if Google will compete with this when they release their supercomputer grid/cluster to the world.
I feel more like I do right now than I did a while ago.
IBM Provides Access to Blue Gene On Demand.
I would be interested if Penelope Cruz is wearing them!
The problem is the users
I'll buy some time to run this program
int main() {
for(;;) fork();
}
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
financial and weather modeling and also a number of customers in market segments that have traditionally not been able to effectively access a supercomputer at a price within their budgets.
A signed up member of IBM's marketing department. It sounds a slightly odd slashdot line.
Nice advertising though, and an interesting proposition.
The mainframe is dead... long live the mainframe
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Who's next to offer "pay as you compute" access to supercomputer level systems? Apple? HP? Toshiba? Hitatchi? Is this going to be a new market segment or just a flash in the pan? Are companies going to begin outsourcing computer time? Are there going to be giant compute centers in India housing huge systems crunching numbers for companies that would have planed to invest in a lower level super computer for inside use? Will this kill supercomputer/supercluster sales or drive them up?
An interesting development for sure.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
Now I can compile Gentoo in under a day.
It reminds me of what SUN was talking about in this.
;))
Jonathan Schwartz must be happy to see that finally, his idea of selling cpu time is being realised (and how much he loves IBM
Anyway, even if, I guess, the price will be lot higher than Jimi Hendrix (and that's something), the few people getting access to some of the best performing supercomputers is really nice.
To sum up : nice business plan.
I remember when a friend of mine working at IBM when they were in the process of chosing the name told be that he was pushing the "Blue Gene" name to piss off creation "scientists" and other religious nuts who don't believe in genes and the fact of evolution and speciation in the DarwinOS-style fashion. Just wait before "Dr." Richard Paley (a teacher of "Divinity" and "Theobiology" at Fellowship "University") will write another idiotic crackpot bullshit in his "Evolutionism Propaganda" column. Let me quote: However, these propagandists aren't just targeting the young. Take for example Apple Computers, makers of the popular Macintosh line of computers. The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called... Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism. They try to hide all of this under a facade of shiny, "lickable" buttons, but the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote Godless Darwinism and Communism. People like "Dr." Richard Paley makes me proud to be an atheist, and the humor of IBM's and Apple's developers only keeps reminding me about it.
Will businesses with virtually infinite money just use this to break encryption and destroy their competitors?
Most researcher would love to have free access to this much cpu calculation power ...
...
...
.1 seconds , nice ....
Instead of charging a fee on entry , why dont they take a percentage on the discovery
And for fuck sake can we stop building this things to predict the weather , or its just a lame ass excuse to cover the paimenet made to somebody else and no one ask did it really cost that much , If I whant to know the weather I get my head outside , prediction are often more then not : wrong
Compile the Gnu/Linux kernel in
Finding the sequence for a new aids vaccine.
Too bad they don't use a bit a bit of it themselves... Of course if history is any indicator they probably thought the demand would only be about four customers world-wide. ;-)
What OS is it running? In case it's not Linux (chances are it isn't), can one slap Linux on it? How would it (Linux) perform? BTW, what distro would perform best?
This should come in handy the next time I forget my password.
Is it really news? They've had commercials running on TV for this for weeks, if not months. If they had commercials back then, that decision and announcement would've been done before. Why is this news now?
Not that it's not a cool idea...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
book some time to play doom3...
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
I really just want to play Tetris on it.
... we'd have to invent one."
But one of us already did. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"IBM's world renowned Blue Gene supercomputing system, the most powerful supercomputer..." The video card on it is crap.
for the best folding@home score you will ever know?
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
... a beowulf cluster of THOSE puppies?
For starters, think of the size of the network pipes you'd need between them. (Image of a bundle of optical fibers the size of a watermain.)
Awesome!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Huh?! You're just out to get me!! Here, have some money!
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
35 comments and we sucessfully /.ed the worlds most powerful super computer.
KEEP IT UP!
So are they going to be doing Folding@Home when no one is using it.
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I know let's take my 5.7 TeraFlops, your 5.7 TeraFlops, and his 5.7 TeraFlops and run a Beowulf cluster...
Did CowboyNeal just take over /. ?? 8 out of the 10 postings are his!!!
-ItsME
Or does one need to re-write her/his software to use their own?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I did not think it was possible: this Slashdot article about IBM on-demand clusters is even MORE BORING than the article on a motherboard accepting both AMD and Intel CPUs. I can't wait for the next one.
When they outsource computing time to India, all the computers in the US are gonna get together and make a peaceful demonstration... They would pop up BSOD's just before you click save... And Linux will join in with "OOPs... I told ya not to piss me off..."
-ItsME
Just wait until Google have capitalized on the Google bar's feature of "borrowing" CPU cycles when your computer when you're not using it (talk about grabbing candy from gullible people). Then they'll be able to compete with IBM and the others in super-/grid computing.
5.7 teraflops, that's just nuts. I mean, wow.
Or maybe it's just me getting old, I remember when we were impressed by a VAX 785 upgrade to our 780.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
Just ask it to make some tea
I've heard Iran, North Korea and Al-Qaeda are showing a great deal of interest in buying CPU time. I think there's a big potential market out there.
Back in the 19th century major companies had a 'Vice President of Power', like we have a VP of IT. Then, a few companies started making all the electricity in one place, and rolling it out to where it was needed. It's always more efficient that way (economies of scale, and diminishing marginal return can become negligble with proper managment).
Do you think IT will become just another commodity like electricity or water?
Sorry YOU deserved my last mod point.
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
hehe I'd like to rent this to bring to the next LAN party... I'd be the game server and no one would lag ;)
hmmm it's pretty damn big though. I guess I'd have to bring the LAN party to it.
What FPS games have been ported to Blue Gene? Are any of those multi-player?
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
This is the same computing model as was used in large "computing centers" - such as those in universities - back in the 1950s-1970s:
...). Just buy the size of pipe you need to keep from being bottlenecked at peak load and leave it mostly idle. (You'd end up doing that by proxy anyhow - eliminate the middleman.) Client-server computing models moved institutions to a similar model for crunch and storage. General-user timesharing services gave way to networking services with unmetered shell accounts, which gave way to pure networking services, as the cheapening of computation evolved the personal terminal from a special purpose keyboard/display/comm box, first to terminal emulation on a dumb computer, then to one application on a progressively more powerful (though still small and cheap) computer functioning as a full-blown network node.
The machine you need is too expensive to buy yourself and then leave sitting around idle most of the time (like a pencil sharpener). So an institution buys and sets one up, and you rent chunks of its time. If the demand goes up the institution gets more rent and can buy upgrades.
You get a machine fast enough to do your too-big-for-humans computing task in a short time (so YOU don't spend most of your time waiting to do YOUR next piece of work, like a pencil sharpener). You only pay for the amount you use.
Billing by CPU seconds, I/O volume, memory usage (fast and files), etc.
In the '50s you took your work to the machine, by the '60s remote terminals were becoming available, by the '70s packet-switching networks were making machines available across continents.
And also by about the '70s you were starting to see both comm and crunch becomming so cheap that, for ordinary jobs, accounting by the slice no longer made economic sense. Better use of money scattering (cheap) computers around and making them wait than only having a few and making (expensive) people wait.
Paying for comm by usage metering never caught on (too bursty, wastes human attention worrying about the effect on the bill,
But there are still REALLY BIG jobs were the economics of a shared utility make perfect sense. IBM was once a primary provider of machines to such utilities within educational and business institutions. Now it's largely a business service provider. It seems approprate they should recognize the opportunity and use it as a way to make a profit by filling a gap at the high end of the computing market.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And for fuck sake can we stop building this things to predict the weather [...]
They're not building it "to predict weather". They're building it to do really large computation jobs.
Predicting weather is just one canonical example of a really hard and really useful thing to do that can be done well by throwing enough crunch at it.
Some others are fluid/aerodynamic modeling, chemical geometry modeling (especially protein folding and drug/receptor interactions), graphics rendering, mechanical structure and motion simulation, and subatomic particle interactions.
You'll notice that, in the blurb, they mentioned commercial uses of all of those except for the nuclear engineering applications.
Given that applied nuclear physics is heavily regulated worldwide, legal users are likely to be funded well enough to have their own machines, and governments get worried about such info traveling on open networks, IBM probably doesn't see much market for that service - or at least not much that they can sell into. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Blue Gene runs Doom III with a comfortable 70 frames per second ;)
Money talks But it don't sing and dance And it don't talk As long as I can have you login to me I'd much rather be Forever in blue genes. Honey is sweet But it ain't nothing next to Big Blue's treat And if you'll pardon me I'd like to say We'll do okay Forever in blue genes Maybe tonight Maybe tonight by the drive array All alone you and i Nothing around but the sound Of my drives and your sighs Money talks But it don't sing and dance And it can't crunch As long as I can have you logged into me I'd much rather be Forever in blue genes And money is sweet But it ain't nothing next to big blue's treat And if you'll pardon me I'd like to say I'd like to say I'd like to say I'd like to say I'd like to say I'd like to say I'd like to say I'd like to say ERROR
...the ACS-1?
These guys offer open access to the Cray machines they have online. You have to get permission from them to do certain things but that's still a small price to get access to a cray.
Not exactly the same thing as the article but definitely a way for the average joe to learn about supercomputers without building one himself.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Yeah, I remember my dad telling me that back in the early days of computing how computers used to be so big that they filled rooms as large as..... oh wait, Nevermind.
Kinda looks like a bowling alley too.
For instance, an industry standard connection for peripherals is idiosyncratically retermed "FireWire" (or should we just be honest and call it "HellFireWire"?) while the familiar Recycle Bin is given its new cult name of "Trash Can".
This site has been around for a while. It is well know to be a joke. It's not even very subtle, yet people still get taken in by it.
There are even little clues like this:
<META name="generator" content="Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath generated all">
It's a joke.
My birthday is comming soon ...
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (http://www.llnl.gov/) purchased a BlueGene/L all for themselves. They are not predicting the weather, they are using to simulate our nuclear weapon stockpile performance (http://www.llnl.gov/llnl/missions/nwss.jsp).
http://forum.folding-community.org/viewtopic.php?p =67420#67420
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And stuff like that. Nanotechnology research. Genetics. Anything that requires stupid amounts of CPU to simulate accurately (believe me, the scientists have no end of problems that they would love to apply massive CPU effort towards). I knew some guys who wrote the first filesystem for Blue Gene, years before it was actually built. Cool stuff.
Also, IBM has been big on the idea of "Grid Computing" for a while now. Where you rent your CPU cycles from a utility company, and pay for as much as you use (like electricity or water). That lets the available CPU be shared around more efficiently, rather than everyone having their own desktop machines that usually spend 95% of their time idle.
Personally I don't think Grid Computing will catch on anytime soon, but IBM is always forward-thinking about stuff like this. Who knows what the future will bring.
can I use to it compile my HL2 maps? Please?
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Go watch the movie "War games." My post will make much more sense that way.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Do they create a virtual machine of specific number of CPUs, and boot your choice of OS, and let you work on it, or to they take your (gasp!) Java apps and run them? How do you really use a grid?
I had a list of kernel config options to try in Linux, and wanted to compile a kernel for each option. I thought a grid is great for it... maybe 30 CPUs for an hour should do it.. and didnt know if I can get multiple virtual machines too, say 2 of 15 CPUs each. But for Sun, the minimum amount was something like 1000 CPU hours to purchase, and little info was provided on how to run the thing or access it.
Someone should have a poor man's grid, of a bunch of linux-running dual-CPU athlon64 machines, on which you could transfer your files and so whatever... just like dedicated servers, only for much smaller amounts of time.
Hmmmm... ideas.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
some time on the IBM computer.Increasingly the time lag between stories being reported on major news sites and their being posted on /. is getting absurdly long.
t s_ bluegene/
/. before it's too late.What with the Duplicates, the blatant Advertising ( a well known story poster everyone calls roland) , piss-poor editing , /. has become a parody of its former self.
I read about this some time yesterday here
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/11/ibm_ren
Come on Taco , Please do something to fix
Wanted : A Signature.
Hmm, weather prediction could be quite useful to you if you were in the insurance business. In fact you couldn't insure your house with unknown risk.
does anyone know what one uses to program this thing? i found some references to ibm journal publications that are accepted, but not in print yet, and a low level (but nicely simple) message passing library. is it just nasty MPI?
"...cannot use SETI@Home or Folding@Home for drug research, can they?"
You're telling me when I go to somebodys place and their screensaver on their PC is looking for aliens that isn't drug research?
Welcome, you must be new to earth.
Need Mercedes parts ?
blue gene du du du i once met a girl named blue gene...