IBM, Sun square up in supercomputer market

By Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 27 June 2007 07:24

Home IT

IBM says the new model in its Blue Gene supercomputer family has almost three times the grunt of its predecessor, but Sun is looking to muscle into the market with its new Constellation system.

Supercomputers achieve high performance by spreading calculations among a large number of processors. Blue Gene/P is based on a CPU chip containing four 850MHz PowerPC 450 cores. 32 chips are mounted on one board, and 32 boards are installed in a rack (giving 4096 processor cores).

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.