p2pnet - rss feed: Blue Gene Bop
p2pnet.net News:- IBM’s Blue Gene project may have been bopping along nicely as a, "grand experiment in supercomputing, but results of the research could show up in more commonplace products down the road."
The quote is from an InformationWeek story here and goes on:
"The engine that’s driven computer-industry growth for the last 30 years - the doubling of processing power every 18 months or so achieved by shrinking the size of on-chip components - has just about given way because designs are running too hot, hurting performance," says the story, going on:
"That requires new approaches. ‘Power gets out of control when you get to these dimensions,’ says Bernard Meyerson, chief technologist in IBM’s systems and technology group. ‘Devices run hot, and you get bizarre technical results. Any computing technology that attempts to drive beyond today’s level of performance runs into a power cliff’."
The story also points out Intel has similar problems and that last month, it canceled a major Pentium product line because of a hot-running design and said it would concentrate on developing special ‘dual-core‘ chips instead of pushing the performance of its conventional ones.
However, an Oakland Tribune story here states: "When installed early next year, Blue Gene/L will leapfrog Japan’s Earth Simulator as the world’s fastest and, with other machines installed at Livermore, turn the nuclear-weapons lab into far and away the global capital of supercomputing for at least a year. IBM’s Blue Gene/L will deliver dozens of times the speed of traditional "big iron" supercomputers on less than a third of the electrical juice.
"It’s a cluster on steroids," Michel McCoy, the lab’s acting chief of advanced weapons simulation and computing is quoted as saying.
When it introduced Blue Gene last year, IBM said it ranked as the 73rd most powerful supercomputer in the world.
Roughly the size of a 30" TV, it has a peak speed of 2 teraflops (2 trillion mathematical operations per second), the full Blue Gene/L machine is 128 times larger, occupying 64 full racks.
"When completed in 2005, IBM expects Blue Gene/L to lead the Top500 supercomputer list," says IBM, adding:
"Compared with today’s fastest supercomputers, it will be six times faster, consume 1/15th the power per computation and be 10 times more compact than today’s fastest supercomputers."
