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."

Comments

Google?

[macpulse]

I wonder if Google will compete with this when they release their supercomputer grid/cluster to the world.

Re:Google?

[karvind]

Very possible. But I wonder how does the bandwidth between the processors will compare for the two cases (and will determine what kind of supercomputing applications can be run on them) ? Blue gene is custom designed ( each chip = two processors, four accompanying mathematical engines, 4MB of memory and communication systems for five separate networks). On the other hand google uses commercially available servers and hence may be able to offer the service lot cheaper.

Re:Google?

[jacksonj04]

IIRC the Google grid is mostly incapable of general computing, for reasons such as memory being allocated in 64mb blocks.

First SUN, and now IBM...

[JawzX]

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.

SUN

[A.K.A_Magnet]

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.

Think about it

[Anonymous Coward]

Most researcher would love to have free access to this much cpu calculation power ...

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 .1 seconds , nice ....

Finding the sequence for a new aids vaccine.

Re:5.7 teraflops

[temponaut]

The article means 5.7 teraflops peak performance for a customer. Perhaps they are throttling the cpu per customer to 5.7 max? You know; 5.7 should be enough for everybody!

Re:5.7 teraflops

[PxM]

The problem with that metric is that SETI@home has such as high lag time between nodes (data gets sent every few hours or so) that you can't really compare it with a supercomputer for most tasks. It would be better to say SETI@home is running at N*X where N is the average user count and X is the FLOPS/user. Other companies are already selling distributed computing time.

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I wonder, which APIs they support

[mi]

Parallel Virtual Machine? Any of the Message Passing Interface implementations?

Or does one need to re-write her/his software to use their own?

Computing Power Becoming a Commodity?

[neomage86]

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?

Re:When computers used to fill bowling alley rooms

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

Gene Amdahl - IBM's archetect for much of the mainframe era - was a lower-level worker at an early company before he went to IBM. (Honeywell, I think it was, or maybe Univac.) While working there he watched in amazement as a computer was designed and delivered to a research institution and it wouldn't fit through the doors. They had to tear out the wall of the basement to get it in. (Then they had to tear it out again to get it OUT when they retired it. B-) )

One of the first things he decreed when he became IBM's archetect was the dimensions of the standard IBM "blue box" - the chassis module into which they built the pieces of all their mainframe products in decades. (Note that, unlike other vendors, it is NOT a standard multi-bay relay rack.)

It's a couple inches narrower than the standard elevator door and a couple inches shorter than the depth of a standard elevator car. B-)