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IBM's Blue Gene Runs Continuously At 1 Petaflop
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is reporting on IBM's claim that the Blue Gene/P will continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop. It is actually capable of 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops. IBM claims that at 1 petaflop, Blue Gene/P is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops! 'Like the vast majority of other modern supercomputers, Blue Gene/P is composed of several racks of servers lashed together in clusters for large computing tasks, such as running programs that can graphically simulate worldwide weather patterns. Technologies designed for these computers trickle down into the mainstream while conventional technologies and components are used to cut the costs of building these systems. The chip inside Blue Gene/P consists of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz each. A 2x2 foot circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn out 435 billion operations a second. Thirty two of these boards can be stuffed into a 6-foot-high rack.'"
Well the the stack of laptops might be tall, but even the 216 racks would stack up to 1/5 of a mile high.
How many of these are "real world"? Well, medical and CFD applications are significant, but hardly what you'd call mainstream, and the raytracing may have been used in Titanic on a smaller scale, but IMAX is under no threat at this time.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
While the new IBM Blue Gene/P system is impressive, I'm more curious to see what sort of new supercomputer Andreas Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems has put together.
Here's an interesting quote about Bechtolsheim from the article: 'He's a perfectionist,' said Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, who worked with Mr. Bechtolsheim beginning in 1983 at Sun. 'He works 18 hours a day and he's very disciplined. Every computer he has built has been the fastest of its generation.'
BG/P will support 2 GB standard for each compute node. A compute node has 4 core processors. An option for 4 GB of memory is also available. On BG/L the initial memory configuration at Livermore was 512 MB per compute node which consisted of 2 core processors. Since 2007 BG/L has offered 1 GB memory as the standard configuration.
A tricky question, but not all that interesting. A fast server processor is within a factor of 4 of the fastest supercomputer processor in the world. That does not mean that you can do equivalent work with the server processor. Among other things, processing performance (gigaflops) of a CPU, is no longer the interesting part of a supercomputer. (It never really was) memory bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth and latency, and I/O performance are the more interesting features of supers. 12 year old Cray processors still have five times the memory bandwidth of modern PC processors, and twenty times the I/O bandwidth.
You'll notice, that 98% of the supercomputers, sold in the last 10 years, all use server processors. (Blue Gene actually uses an embedded systems processor, but it's the same idea) However, in the late 80's putting 256 processors in a super was cutting edge. In the 90's, a few thousand. Soon you'll see a quarter million cores. So supers are actually getting faster at a higher rate than are desktops, at least by most measures.