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IBM Bringing Petaflop Supercomputing to Europe

Paul Lilly — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:27:53 -0600

With IBM having recently announced it was building a supercomputer with 1.6 million cores capable of 20 petaflops of computing power, its hard to get too jazzed over a single petaflop. But for Europe, breaking the petaflop barrier is something that hasn't been done, but soon will be.

IBM and German research center Forschungszentrum Juelich are collaborating to build a new Blue Gene/P System supercomputer for Europe. It will mark the first time that a supercomputer capable of delivering petaflops of performance will be located outside of the U.S.

"With speeds over a Petaflop, this new Juelich-based supercomputer offers the processing ability of more than 200,000 laptop computers," explains Professor Thomas Lippert, lead scientist of the Juelich supercomputing center. "In addition to raw power, this new system will be among the most energy efficient in the world."

The Blue Gene/P System will house 294,912 processor, 144TB of memory, and 6PB of hard drive storage contained within 72 server racks. Adding to the historical significance, it will also be IBM's first watercooled supercomputer. IBM says the use of watercooling will result in a 91 percent reduction in air conditioning units that otherwise would have been required to cool the data center.

Image Credit: Forschungszentrum Juelich

IBM Building Supercomputer with 1.6 Million Cores, Expects to Hit 20 Petaflops

Paul Lilly — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:17:57 -0600

We don't want to spook anyone wearing an aluminum foil deflector beanie, but pretty soon the U.S. government will be the owner of two more supercomputers from IBM, one of which will scale to 20 petaflops, enough power to probably be able to penetrate industrial strength aluminum to read minds.

It was less than a year ago that IBM became the first to break the petaflops performance mark, also used by the government. The new IBM BlueGene-class systems will make its home at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and will handle analysis of the U.S. nuclear stockpile (and spy on your thoughts). But the full 20 petaflops of computing power won't be available right away. The deal stipulates IBM will deliver one of its BlueGene/P systems capable of 500 teraflops by April, with a followup system called Sequoia to be delivered sometime in 2012.

"The Sequoia system will be 15 times faster than BlueGene/P with roughly the same footprint and a modest increase in pwoer consumption," said Herb Schultz, manager in IBM's deep computing group.

BlueGene/P uses a modified PowerPC 450 processor clocked at 850MHz with four cores and up to 4,096 processors in a rack. The Sequoia system uses 45nm processors with as many as 16 cores per chip running "significantly faster." Sequoia will also have 1.6 million petabytes of memory feeding its 1.6 million cores.

Image Credit: IBM

10 Most Powerful Computers of All Time

Tom Edwards — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:45:10 -0500

Sure, you overclock your rig to the bleeding edge, direct deposit your paycheck to Newegg, and are on the utility company’s watch list because of the blackouts you’ve been known to cause. Yes, you’re a badass power user, but let’s face it, none of your home-built rigs can touch these 10 beasts. So what if half of these machines only exist in the minds of sci-fi writers – their computational prowess transcends the fiction/reality plane, putting our mighty Petaflop age to shame. Peruse this list for inspiration and then get building, you’ve got some catching up to do before you can compete with the real big boys. We won’t settle until our rigs achieve sentience.

10.Tardis

Dr. Who is the original geek cult TV series, beating Star Trek to the small screen by three years, and while Tardis is not the only rig on this list allows for time travel, were suckers for that Time Lord tech, and doubly impressed that the Tardis is grown, not built, making it the ultimate green PC.

9. WABAC machine

Baseball. Nope. A beautiful summer day. No way. The ice cream man. Uh-uh. Nothing, seemingly, was powerful enough to draw kids outside when Rocky and Bullwinkle was on and Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman hopped into the WABAC machine.

8. Holly

Although regularly showing signs of senility due to spending 3 million years on its own, we find Holly’s ability to transform from a middle aged, balding man into a blonde woman a particularly desirous skill for many technophiles.

7. Proteus IV

Talk about packing a load of RAM, no other machine we know of has the power to impregnate Julie Christie!

6. Deep Blue

What could possibly be more boring than watching a chess match? In our book, nothing (that is until someone decides to start broadcasting online poker tournaments). Until that day arrives, chess retains the title of worst spectator sport ever devised. Yet the epic battle between Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov had us rethink this proposition. Deep Blue’s 1997 victory gave us an early view into the mind of our soon-to-arrive computer overlords.

5. WOPR

Yes, in fact, we would like to play a game. The WOPR takes us back to a more innocent time when a 2400 baud modem and a bit of ingenuity would allow you to change your grades or play a game of Global Thermonuclear War. And in a game of chess, we’ll take WOPR over entry No. 6 any day.

4. Roadrunner

Roadrunner is a $133 million computer used for classified military projects. Perhaps a $135 million computer will be able to find weapons of mass destruction.

3. HAL

How many conversations between a man and a computer have become cultural touchstones? By our count, one. Even folks who consider sci-fi a sort of geek plague that will instantaneously make you wear your pants three inches too high and utilize a Flowbee for your next haircut know that HAL doesn’t want to open the pod bay doors.

2. Master Control Program

We can think of no other computer powerful enough to cause a grown man to do this:

1. M5 Multitronic System

Yes, Dr. Who was first, but Start Trek remains unquestionably the geek TV touchstone. And while the other machines on this list present a broad range of unique and previously unseen powers, we’re quite confident in our assessment that no other machine could possibly be more powerful than the rig that was powerful enough to power the ship that powered the show that powers a million geeks!

Something we left off the list? Enter your choices in the comments below.

$208 Million Petascale Computer System Gets Green Light

Paul Lilly — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:42:05 -0500

Forget about dual, quad, or even eight-core processors, all of which would prove woefully inadequate next to the system being called Blue Waters. The 200,000 processor core supercomputer got the green light at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, finalizing a contract with IBM to build the what will be the world's first sustained petascale computational system.

For anyone not up on their flops, a petaflop is the equivalent to roughly 1 quadrillion calculations per second, presumably just enough to get a decent framerate out of Crysis. Coupled with the 200,000 processor cores will be more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. And yes, that would hold a lot of porn, though Blue Waters will spend its time on scintillating real-world scientific and engineering applications.

Specifically, the National Science Foundations says that Blue Waters will wade into the study of complex processes like the interaction of the Sun's coronal mass ejections with the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere. Other examples include the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe, understanding the chains of reactions that occur with livings cells, the design of novel materials, and other decidedly nerd topics that have nothing to do with propelling Folding at Home team 11108 ahead of the competition.