IBM Open Sources Supercomputer Code

eldavojohn writes "IBM has announced at the LinuxWorld conference that they are now hosting all their supercomputing stack software as open source from the University of Illinois. From the article: 'The software will initially support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and IBM Power6 processors. IBM is planning to add support for Power 575 supercomputing servers and IBM x86 platforms such as System x 3450 servers, BladeCenter servers and System x iDataPlex servers. The stack includes several distinct software tools that have been tested and integrated by IBM. These include the Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit (xCAT), originally developed for large clusters based on Intel's commodity x86 architecture but now modified for clusters based on IBM's own Power architecture. xCAT is used in the National Nuclear Security Administration's Roadrunner Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico — a hybrid cluster currently ranked by the official Top 500 list as the world's most powerful supercomputer.' For several years, Linux has been a strong tool for supercomputing."

Comments

Sweet

[0100010001010011]

Now I have something to run on that spare Power4 I have laying around in the basement.

Re:Sweet

[VoyagerRadio]

Seriously, though: would the Power6 have been the successor to the chip family we call Apple's G5? (You know, if Apple had continued using PowerPC chips?) I'm researching this using Wikipedia but haven't yet discovered the answer...any Slashheads know?

Re:Sweet

[pleappleappleap]

I don't know about you, but I actually do have extra POWER hardware in my basement. And my living room. And my dining room.

Re:Sweet

[pleappleappleap]

No. The PowerPC architecture is mostly a subset of POWER. The POWER processors have all of the instructions of PowerPC, plus more. And they're built a little more robustly, since they're designed for the enterprise server market.

Re:Sweet

[EvilRyry]

Something power6 derived anyways. Apple always wanted their chips with the Alitvec instructions which weren't part of any of the other power series. They also didn't want to pay a whole lot for these custom chips which they order in relatively small quantity. Its little wonder IBM didn't rush to get them new CPUs, they're probably happy Apple is just leaving them alone.

Re:Sweet

[pleappleappleap]

IBM's later chips have AltiVec, even though they have nothing to do with Apple anymore.

Re:Sweet

[davester666]

Really? Small quantities? IBM is really selling so many supercomputers that they need to produce more than a million of these Power chips every year?

More likely, the requirements that Apple wanted/needed for it's PowerPC chips were different enough from where IBM wanted for the Power chip line, and IBM/Apple couldn't come to a financial agreement to produce the PowerPC chips that Apple needed [as in, the combination of cost per chip/capabilities of chip/when chip would be available that Apple wanted and what IBM could/would provide were different enough that they decided to go their separate ways.

And I would guess that IBM really didn't want Apple to sell their POWER chips, because Apple's XServe line would probably significantly impact IBM's sales of their POWER blades...

Re:Sweet

[Anpheus]

If each supercomputer contains a hundred thousand CPUs, they only need to sell TEN supercomputers.

If each mainframe contains a hundred CPUs, they only need to sell ten thousand mainframes.

See, those are quantities that help make sense of this. A Blue Gene/P installation can use up to nearly 900,000 processors alone.

So yes, IBM probably does ship more CPUs than Apple does. IBM doesn't just fabricate and sell Power chips either, so I'd say there's probably a pretty wide margin.

Re:Sweet

[ksd1337]

I hear Vista runs decent on this hardware.

Re:Sweet

[Anpheus]

There's an IBM chip in every one of the three major consoles, which have sold around 50 million units in 2 years.

And that's a small part of their business. IBM sells a lot more chips, period, than probably anyone other than Intel or maybe there's an ARM manufacturer that does more business. But IBM also fabs ARM CPUs, so there you go.

Great

[thammoud]

Just when there no longer any COBOL programmers around.

Re:Great

[pleappleappleap]

COBOL for supercomputers? I don't think so. More FORTRAN. COBOL is used for business code. These machines are primarily used for modeling.

Re:Great

[Nerdfest]

These machines are primarily used for modeling.

You mean like on a runway across the top of the machines? You may have just thought of a way to re-ignite interest in supercomputing.

We don't host xCAT

[dlapine]

Try hereinstead. And yes, xCAT kicks butt if you want to run a linux cluster. More so, now that it's open source.

Re:We don't host xCAT

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yes we do.

ftp://linuxpatch.ncsa.uiuc.edu/OpenHPC/

the real goal

[xzvf]

I work for IBM, but this is speculation. The vast majority of money generated and earned on large Linux clusters came from selling hardware and services. This can only help generating that business.

Re:the real goal

[mikael]

I heard this story about Cray. If you bought a supercomputer and support contract from them, they would throw in the free construction of an office block to run the computer in.

I'm confused about IBM

[contrapunctus]

They open source stuff and they patent ridiculous stuff. Am I supposed to like them or not?

Re:I'm confused about IBM

[pleappleappleap]

If you don't want them to have to patent "ridiculous stuff" ensure that the business environment changes so that they don't need to.

Re:Obligotory

[pleappleappleap]

That would be exceedingly stupid. Why not just make a larger cluster over the high-speed clustering medium instead of throwing unnecessary Beowulf overhead into the process.

patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

will it be offered in paper or plastic ?

Cluster administration software should only be FS

[shlompo]

I used to be in charge of administrating the lab cluster at the MOSIX project (http://www.mosix.org). The tools we used back then, where series of scripts, that performed all possible configurations you'll ever need... we called it CLIP (CLuster Installtion Package). My two years experience taught me two things:
1. It's sometimes easier to script your way through, instead of adapting existing administration tools. You'll just have a peek first, of course...
2. But when you must, you'll encounter a modification you'd want very quickly.
So my advice would be only accept open source administration systems. As i'm sure others have reached the same conclusions i had, This is actually a win-win move by IBM, and i'm sure they'll get more users, and more income following.

Alright. now compare this to what microsoft

[unity100]

did in latest oscon. what do you see ? rock solid commitment compared to empty pr. you know which of them pertains to which company ...

I really want to see someone answering this :

[unity100]

IBM has been supporting the Open source community but has the community returned the favor?