Author Topic: IBM's Blue Gene passes petaflop milestone (Read 515 times)

Sundowner · « **on:** June 26, 2007, 05:29:47 PM »

Man...thats a lot of 'flops.

Git some.

Regards,
Sun

IBM claims that its new Blue Gene/P supercomputer, operating at petaflop speed performs more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack of laptops.

IBM has devised a new Blue Gene supercomputer -- the Blue Gene/P -- that will be capable of processing more than 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops, a possible record. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations.

Blue Gene/P marks a significant milestone in computing. Last November, the Blue Gene/L was ranked as the most powerful computer on the planet: it topped out at 280 teraflops, or 280 trillion operations a second during continuous operation.

Put another way, a Blue Gene/P operating at a petaflop is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high (2.4km) stack of laptops.

The development of Blue Gene/P seems certain to extend IBM's position atop the Top 500 Supercomputer list, which comes out this week at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany. IBM had 93 computers on the list when the rankings last came out in November; four were in the top 10.

The 1-petaflop Blue Gene/P comes with 294,912 processors and takes up 72 racks in all. Hitting 3 petaflops takes an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster, according to IBM. The chips and other components are linked together in a high-speed optical network.......
Full Article:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/hardware/soa/IBM-s-Blue-Gene-passes-petaflop-milestone/0,130061702,339279111,00.htm

Krusty · « **Reply #1 on:** June 26, 2007, 05:35:51 PM »

Man, with that many processors you're spending most of your computing time figuring out which has what data, and waiting and reassembling, and splitting apart the new instructions.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather they work on making improvements into single units, rather than stringing millions of units together.

Balsy · « **Reply #2 on:** June 26, 2007, 07:24:07 PM »

Hitech Creations announces that the Blue GENE IBM computer meets the minimum to run Aces High II at default settings.

Sundowner · « **Reply #3 on:** June 26, 2007, 08:10:00 PM »

I don't believe the single-unit method will match the exponential gains in sheer computational power that networked CPUs realize year after year.

Also, these latest IBMs are not just sitting and rendering floating point operations to set a record.

They are deployable for real world high level simulation calculations relating to highly dynamic states.
(Think fluid/air dynamics, weather, nuclear, cosmology, etc, etc, etc.)

The APPs they run require huge xFLOP capabilities and if data/instruction logistics overhead consumed a significant chunk of computational power I believe these APPs would bog down to non-functionality.

Regards,
Sun

Sundowner · « **Reply #4 on:** June 26, 2007, 08:10:37 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Balsy
Hitech Creations announces that the Blue GENE IBM computer meets the minimum to run Aces High II at default settings.

Regards,
Sun

Roscoroo · « **Reply #5 on:** June 26, 2007, 08:58:37 PM »

this will fit in a containeer with a shipping tag to texas ...wont it ??

Wes14 · « **Reply #6 on:** June 26, 2007, 09:19:39 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Balsy
Hitech Creations announces that the Blue GENE IBM computer meets the minimum to run Aces High II at default settings.

Then it Owns my computer.

Skuzzy · « **Reply #7 on:** June 27, 2007, 10:35:17 AM »

Real-time aerodynamic calculations could eat it alive. But it does allow more to be done than before.

Pretty cool.

Wolfala · « **Reply #8 on:** June 27, 2007, 03:28:05 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Skuzzy
Real-time aerodynamic calculations could eat it alive. But it does allow more to be done than before.

Pretty cool.

I'd think maybe 10% of those CPU's would be dedicated on how to optimize power consumption across the grid, and maybe run a $ counter above on a cost per minute of operation.

Wolf

ForrestS · « **Reply #9 on:** June 27, 2007, 05:14:34 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Balsy
Hitech Creations announces that the Blue GENE IBM computer meets the minimum to run Aces High II at default settings.

Wolfala · « **Reply #10 on:** June 27, 2007, 05:31:00 PM »

40KW power consumption per rack * 216 racks = 8.640 Megawatts when at full blast.
07cents per KW hour * 8640 = $605.00 per hour

13 ton/rack air conditioning per rack * 216 = 2,808 tonns of A/C required. Probably costs more to cool then to run is my guess.

8.9 bels noise per rack * 216 = sleeping next to a shop vac.

Holy ****.

Wolf

ForrestS · « **Reply #11 on:** June 27, 2007, 08:47:27 PM »

Dude your avatar is hot.

AcId · « **Reply #12 on:** June 28, 2007, 07:56:18 AM »

blah blah, more hardware, blah blah.......I have nothing against IBM but imho the direction they're going is outdated. How's about spendin that money on quantum processor development

Krusty · « **Reply #13 on:** June 28, 2007, 10:03:25 AM »

I'd love to see somebody perfect holographic storage (write/read times at the speed of electrons!)