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Information Technology News IBM, Sun square up in supercomputer market
Information Technology News IBM, Sun square up in supercomputer market | IBM, Sun square up in supercomputer market |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Wednesday, 27 June 2007 | |
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A one-petaflop configuration consists of 72 racks, but the system can be scaled up to 216 racks and three petaflops. (A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second.) IBM claims Blue Gene/P is the fastest computer ever built. Unlike its predecessor - but as with most commercial cluster configurations - Blue Gene/P supports symmetric multiprocessing so any task can be allocated to any idle processor. "Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing, IBM. "A new group of commercial users will be able to take advantage of its new, simplified programming environment and unrivaled energy efficiency. Blue Gene/P installations are planned by the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory (to begin this year), and Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory. In Europe, systems are bound for Germany's Max Planck Society and Forschungszentrum Julich, plus the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council's Daresbury Laboratory. "The big computing power at low electricity rates allows us to boost the performance of very complex and computationally intensive algorithms," said Thomas Lippert, director of the supercomputing center at FZ Julich. Blue Gene's operating system is based on Linux, and existing Blue Gene/L applications will run on the new P model. Read about Sun's Constellation supercomputer on page 2.
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