IBM &#39;Blue Gene&#39; Supercomputer Goes on Sale
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IBM&#39;s record-trouncing Blue Gene supercomputer will now be available with commercial configurations ranging from one-to-64 racks.
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JAPANESE TIN maker NEC has released a mass produced supercomputer computer which it claims knocks the socks off Big Blue&#39;s Blue Gene/L.
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Fresh from setting a record for performance among supercomputers just a few days ago, IBM 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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(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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With performance almost double that of the Earth Simulator, in Yokohama, Japan, IBM Corp.'s Blue Gene/L on Monday was officially ranked first on the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. IBM built four of the top ten machines on the biannual list, which was set to be announced Monday evening at the SC2004 conference in Pittsburgh.
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International Business Machines Corp (IBM) said it created the world&#39;s fastest supercomputer and is using it as the model for smaller, less costly systems due next year that can handle trillions of calculations a second.
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IBM&#39;s Blue Gene/L became the top contender to the supercomputing throne Thursday as Big Blue announced a new incarnation of the machine can perform 70.
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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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The BlueGene/L supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory topped the list of the world&#39;s fastest computers once again, according to the new Top500 list released Wednesday. Built by IBM, BlueGene/L clocks in at 280.6 teraflops, or 280.6 trillion floating point operations per second.
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The Motley Fool - IBM (NYSE: IBM - News) has new bragging rights. Press reports indicate that the technology giant has created the world's fastest supercomputer two years after a Japanese computer claimed that title.
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IBM Corp. has put its PC business up for sale, according to a story published on Friday on the Web site of The New York Times.
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IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Blue Gene/L, which is being installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recaptured the supercomputer speed record that Silicon Graphics' (NYSE: SGI) Columbia system at NASA held for barely a week.
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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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Big Blue has brought the title of the worldâs fastest supercomputer back to the US for the first time in three years. IBMs still incomplete Blue Gene/L system has been officially named the fastest in the
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The two-year reign of the massive Earth Simulator as the fastest supercomputer in the world appears to be nearing an end. IBM executives on Wednesday will announce that one of the new machines in its Blue
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US technology giant IBM is selling its personal computing business to China&#39;s biggest PC maker. The deal highlights China&#39;s growing economic clout and global reach.
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In a historic development in the computing world, IBM has succeeded in re-writing the rulebook for ultra-powerful computing by developing the worldâs most powerful supercomputer- Blue Gene/L supercomputer, surpassing NECâs Earth Simulator in Japan.