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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."
And F@H has 187 TeraFLOPS. However, random companies cannot use SETI@Home or Folding@Home for drug research, can they? :P
My Systems
Blue Gene actaully runs at 70.72 teraflops (http://www.top500.org/lists/2004/11/), and not 5.7.
wtfsig?!11
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.
The joke's on you. The website is a parody.
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RTFA:
IBM's other US based IBM centers in Poughkeepsie, NY, and Houston, TX as well as the European-based center in Montpellier, France are accessible to customers worldwide via a secure VPN connection over the Internet. Clients have on demand access to over 5,200 CPUs of Intel®, AMD Opteron(TM) and IBM POWER(TM) technology based compute power to run the Linux, Microsoft Windows and IBM AIX operating environments. The new center in Rochester, MN introduces over 2,000 CPUs of IBM PowerPC® based Blue Gene technology to run Linux based workloads.
BlueGene runs Linux
I work at LLNL. BlueGene/L supports MPI, as well as a limited form of TCP/IP sockets.
Blue Gene is both a specific 70 TFLOP (soon 360 TLFOP) customer system and a product.
The product is 5.7 TFLOP/rack.
Sun is offering a vanilla Solaris environment that pretty much anyone is familiar with. Is IBM able to deliver a vanilla RHEL/SuSE Enterprise environment on BlueGene? There is a slight difference between a custom-built supercomputer and a rack of standard Opteron and SPARC servers. It seems the other IBM services listed at the bottom of the article are more in-line with Sun's offering.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
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
The only difference is that, I think, all supercomputing centers at this time are government/university-funded, so there is no transfer of actual money in most cases.
The really new idea in grid computing is not that many users share one machine, but many users many machines.