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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!!!
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.
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
BlueGene runs Linux
for the best folding@home score you will ever know?
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
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.
Just ask it to make some tea
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?
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 ;)
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.
Jeez, who's moderating these days...and what do they think redundant means?
Yeah, when I posted someone else had already posted that the Blue Gene website had been slashdotted. But if they read the rest of my post they'd of realized that wasn't the main idea in my post. My immediate thought when I saw that it was slashdotted was that they hadn't expected a high level of interest from the general public. They thought this would be pretty esoteric and limited to a few researchers who needed lots of processing power on an ongoing basis. In fact, if you're passing out 70 teraflops in 5.7 teraflop chunks you're only looking at around 12 customers. Sure some folks won't use a full chuck, but it still won't be more than maybe 50 customers.
That reminded me of a feasibity analysis done at IBM in the late 1940s when IBM was developing their first computer. They stated that the worldwide demand for the machine was expected to be around four machines.
Hence my post. And a sad day for slashdot when I have to explain an allusion to a very famous moment in computing history!