IBM has built a 512-node prototype of its Blue Gene L
supercomputer that has been ranked as the 73rd most powerful
computer in the world.
The machine, which is capable of a peak performance of two
trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops), is about
the size of a 30in TV.
The Blue Gene L supercomputer, which is being built by IBM for
Lawrence Livermore National Labs, will be the first major system to
be built under IBM's Blue Gene research project, which was launched
in 1999.
The project's goal is to build a computer capable of a petaflop,
or one thousand trillion operations per second, about 25 times as
fast as the most powerful computer, the 41-teraflop Earth Simulator
supercomputer.
The key to Blue Gene's ability to extract such performance out
of such a small amount of real estate is the embedded PowerPC
processor that IBM researchers have designed for the machine. Each
Blue Gene chip contains dual floating-point processors, 4Mbytes of
L3 memory and five network controllers.
"It's really this system-on-a-chip technology," said Bill
Pulleyblank, the director of exploratory server systems for IBM
research.
The system-on-a-chip approach means that Blue Gene's nodes do
not contain the kind of features typically found in commodity
systems - disc drives or sound cards or microphone jacks - and
require far less space and power than other computers.
The 700MHz processors have a peak power consumption of around 10
to 15 watts per node, said Don Dossa, a computational physicist
with Lawrence Livermore who is working on the project.
Blue Gene's heat management is further enhanced by a unique
design that will give the supercomputer a tilted look, like a row
of dominos tilted to one side.
"The real secret is by using these low-power processors and by
doing some careful engineering on it, we're able to air-cool the
machine," said Pulleyblank. Because of these two elements, Blue
Gene requires about one-tenth the cooling of a typical
supercomputer.
When Blue Gene L finally ships to Lawrence Livermore's Terascale
Simulation Facility building next year, the 65,000-node machine
will take up 2,500 square feet, less than one-tenth the area of the
Earth Simulator, according to Dossa.
Blue Gene L, which will deliver between 180 teraflops and 360
teraflops, will cost between $50m and $100m to complete, or about
$200,000 per teraflop, Seager said.
Lawrence Livermore's ASCI Purple supercomputer, by comparison,
will cost between $1m and $2m per teraflop, he said.
While Seager characterises Blue Gene L as a "high risk" attempt
to build an affordable supercomputer, it is one that could help the
lab's work on the Stockpile Stewardship programme. "At this point,
we're confident that it will have an impact on the programme," he
said.
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service