IBM&#39;s Blue Gene/L goes on sale
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The machine began life as a research project in 2000, is presently the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer, and has only four publicly announced customers.
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com September 29, 2004, 1:04 PM PT. IBM claimed first place Wednesday in a supercomputer speed competition with an expanded version of its Blue Gene/L that beat out a Japanese machine from NEC.
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From the introduction of its first PC in 1981 to this week&#39;s sale of its PC business to Lenovo of China for about $1.75 billion in cash, IBM has had a quite a few milestones in the PC industry.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM still operates the fastest supercomputer in the industry, but rival Hewlett-PackardÂ has more of them in operation, according to a closely watched global survey released Wednesday. HP has passed IBM in the number of supercomputers in operation and enjoys the largest market share, according to a list of the Top 500 supercomputers that was compiled by university computer researchers in the U.S. and Germany. ButÂ IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer, installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California,Â ranked first on the listÂ and IBM claims it is the market share leader when vendors are ranked by combined computing performance. The biannual list is being released Wednesday to coincide with the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. HP grew its market share to 40.4 percent with 202 systems, while IBM's share fell to 38.4 percent with 192 systems. In the previous report in November 2006, IBM's share was 47.2 percent with 236 systems, to HP's 31.6 percent with 158 systems. IBM said it holds a 42 percent share of the supercomputer market when it's based on the combined processing power of each vendor's equipment. Its Blue Gene/L took the No. 1 spot with a "sustained performance" of 280.6 trillion operations per second, or teraflops. Flops is an acronym for "floating point operations per second," a measure of computing performance. On Tuesday IBM announced a new supercomputer, Blue Gene/P, which will have three times the processing power of the Blue Gene/L. A two-rack test model of the P made it into the top 30 on the list, achieving 20.86 teraflops (T flops), although IBM said that properly configured, the P may be able to hit 3 petaflops (P flops), or 1,000 trillion calculations per second. Sun Microsystems, which held only a 1.4 percent share with only seven systems deployed, is making a concerted effort to pursue the supercomputer market. Sun announced Tuesday it is building a supercomputer, codenamed "Constellation," which is designed to reach 1P flops. It is building Constellation at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin. Sun received $29.6 million of a total $59 million National Science Foundation grant to build Constellation, while the balance of $29.4 million will go towards operational costs, said Faith Singer, a TACC spokeswoman. The Top Five Supercomputer systems in the latest survey, their manufacturer, the number of processors and the user are as follows: 1. IBM, 131,072, US. Department of Energy-Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 2. IBM, 40,960, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. 3. IBM, 12,208 , DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 4. Silicon Graphics Inc., 10,160, NASA Ames Research Center. 5. Bull S.A., 8,704, Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) in France
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IBM (Quote, Chart) secured the top spot in the rankings for world&#39;s fastest supercomputer as Blue Gene/L ran at a sustained speed of 36.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems is aiming to wrest the world supercomputing crown from IBM's Blue Gene, courtesy of a $59 million contract from the University of Texas for its Constellation design. The design provides 21 million flops (floating-point operations per second), potentially reaching 2 petaflops (Pflops). IBM already has a 3-Pflop version of its Blue Gene supercomputer, but Sun could potentially hit the No. 2 spot. Sun's Constellation will be installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center along with other supercomputers and is a Linux cluster system, to be known as Ranger. It will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD's forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades. Ultimately, there will be 1,302 Opterons providing 52,608 cores. The initial memory will be 52.6TB with a final RAM capacity of 105TB. This will be backed up with 1.73PB of disk storage. The system components are connected by InfiniBand with a 3,456-port central switch designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolstein. Its total bandwidth is 110TB per second, and it connects 1,152 cables with 12 connections per wire. The benefit of a big switch is that interswitch cables -- needed if smaller switches were used -- can be dispensed with, saving a lot of money as it's cheaper to build one big switch than link several smaller switches. Six times fewer cables are needed, in fact. Sun also said that the processors get a standard latency for data access this way. It will need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack holds 768 cores. Sun estimates that Constellation could scale to a 2-Pflop system with 1 exabyte of disk capacity. It isn't enough to keep IBM at bay, though. IBM has announced Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the world's most powerful supercomputer. Also a Linux cluster, it nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L, while remaining, according to IBM, the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built. It is designed to run continuously at speeds faster than 1 Pflop and could be configured to reach 3 Pflops. IBM suggests that a home user would need a 1.5-mile-high pile of laptops to have the equivalent of 1 Pflop of computing power. Dave Turek, IBM's deep computing vice president, said, "We see commercial interest in Blue Gene developing now in energy and finance, for example. This is on course with an adoption cycle -- from government labs to leading enterprises -- that we've seen before in the high-performance computing market." IBM said Blue Gene/P is a green supercomputer, being at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer. Its design uses many small low-power chips, each connected through five specialized networks inside the system. Blue Gene/L uses dual-core 700MHz chips. Blue Gene/P has four 850MHz PowerPC 450 processors integrated on a single chip. Each chip is capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. A 2-by-2-foot board containing 32 of these chips churns out 435 billion operations every second, making it more powerful than a typical, 40-node cluster based on two-core commodity processors. Thirty-two of the compact boards comprise the 6-foot-high racks, meaning 4,096 cores per rack -- far denser than Sun's core count per rack. The 1-Pflop Blue Gene/P configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical -- not InfiniBand -- network. A new SMP mode supports multithreaded applications. The U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., will deploy the first Blue Gene/P in the United States beginning later this year. In Germany, the Max Planck Society and Forschungszentrum Julich also plan to begin installing Blue Gene/P systems in late 2007. Additional Blue Gene/P rollouts are being planned by Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, England.
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InfoWorld - Fresh from setting a record for performance among supercomputers just a few days ago, IBM on Monday announced it is making a commercial version of its Blue Gene system available to be aimed at businesses and scientific researchers.
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IBM presenta Blue Gene/L, il computer piÃ¹ potente del mondo. Formato da 16 armadi e oltre 16 mila processori, il super calcolatore Ã¨ in grado di eseguire 70,72 teraflops, in pratica 70 mila miliardi di operazioni a virgola mobile in un secondo.
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Chinese PC vendor Lenovo announced its acquisition of IBM&#39;s Personal Computing Division (PCD) for a combination of cash and stock totaling US$1.25 billion.
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IBM has put its PC business up for sale, according to a story published on Friday on Web site of The New York Times.
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In September, IBM announced that the Blue Gene/L prototype had sustained speeds of 36 trillion calculations per second. Last week, NASA announced that a system built by Silicon Graphics had topped that by sustaining 42 trillion calculations per second.
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Fresh from setting a record for performance among supercomputers just a few days ago, IBM on Monday announced it is making a commercial version of its Blue Gene system available to be aimed at businesses and scientific researchers.
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IBM sells its fourth supercomputer--to tackle the protein-folding challenge that inspired the computer in the first place.
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China&#39;s largest personal computer maker, Lenovo Group Ltd. (0992.HK: Quote, Profile, Research) , said on Wednesday it is buying control of IBM&#39;s PC-making business for $1.25
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IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Blue Gene(R)/L supercomputer continued its four-year reign atop the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list announced today.
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NEW YORK, New York, United States of America -- International Business Machines (IBM) Corp has put its computer business up for sale, the New York Times said Friday, quoting people close to negotiations.
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IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) just can&#39;t stay out of the news this week. On Wednesday the firm announced its deal with China&#39;s Lenovo, a giant step toward Chief Executive Samuel Palmisano&#39;s goal of shifting