IBM's Blue Gene Retains Supercomputer Crown

[Sunite]

IBM's Blue Gene Retains Supercomputer Crown
By Barry Levine
November 13, 2007 9:37AM

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While IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer once again hit the top of the Top 500 Supercomputer list, Big Blue occupied 232 of the top 500 positions -- the most from a single vendor. Of the top 10 supercomputers on the list, four are IBM's, and of the top 100, 38. Of those 232, 183 are cluster configurations of PC server commodity processors.

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   Blue Gene
   Supercomputers
   Intel
   AMD
   Grid Computing

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   Blue Gene is still king. On Monday, IBM announced that supercomputer Blue Gene/L grabbed a new world record and extended its four-year reign at the top of the Top 500 Supercomputer list.

The top machine, located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is 50,000 times more powerful than a home PC. After it was expanded during the summer, Blue Gene/L hit the new world record of 478 teraflops. A teraflop is a trillion calculations per second.

As with any champion, the next record to break is always in mind. IBM said in a statement that it "is closing in on a computing milestone known as a 'petaflop'" -- equivalent to 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

Nearing Petaflop Speeds

Speedy processing runs in the family. Blue Gene/P, recently installed at the research consortium Julich in Germany, holds the second position on the list with a top speed of 167 teraflops. But the company has higher goals for an expanded version of Blue Gene/P, as it was built specifically to operate at petaflop speeds.

In fact, the entire IBM family virtually owns the list, with computer systems from the Armonk, N.Y.-based company occupying 232 of the top 500 positions -- the most from a single vendor. Of the top 10, four are IBM's, and of the top 100, 38. The list is maintained by supercomputing experts from the University of Tennessee, NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Germany's University of Mannheim.

One of IBM's strategies is not creating one or a few superpowerful custom processors, but using lots of relatively ordinary ones. Of those 232 systems, 183 are cluster configurations of PC server "commodity" microprocessors. In 2008, supersystems that are based on IBM's newest Power processors will be available for commercial processing.

Here Comes Roadrunner

But the real champ is just now getting in shape. In the summer of 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory will see the arrival of Roadrunner. This hybrid design will use thousands of AMD PC-level processors in conjunction with a video game console's brains -- the Cell Broadband Engine graphics processor that drives the Sony PlayStation 3. The company said that the two kinds of microprocessors will enable a much more energy-efficient environment that can reach speeds beyond a petaflop.

Aside from press attention and the admiration of adoring fans, the new computer speed breakthrough has practical applications. Simulating earthquakes to improve building structures, modeling of atmospheric conditions, exploring for new natural resources, and engineering for autos and aerospace are some of the processing-intensive tasks that could benefit from such power.

To accomplish these tasks, this new generation of "big iron" must be accompanied by an inventory of equivalent software if it is to do more than just set speed records. IBM said that its petascale initiative is being matched with investments in application support and development tools, including a new open-source developers' program for a Blue Gene/P machine that will take up residence next year at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.