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IBM Open Sources Supercomputer Code

Posted by timothy on from the buttered-up-penguin-is-delicious dept.

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."

4 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. Sweet by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:Sweet by pleappleappleap · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Sweet by EvilRyry · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. I really want to see someone answering this : by unity100 · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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