ACADEMIA

At the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, IBM will present a whole spectrum of deep computing news, ranging from the world's first Petaflops System named Roadrunner down to departmental type HPC solutions like Cell-Processor-based Blade Servers. Next to the presentation of IBM's contributions to the top500 list in terms of Systems currently registered on the list, a number of expert presentations, break-out- and customer seminar sessions, press activities and demosets on site will be offered to participants of ISC at the Dresden Convention Center. Key news will be the discussion of the Roadrunner supercomputer, the world's first system to break the Petaflop/s barrier. At the show, Don Grice, IBM Distinguished engineer, will participate in the ISC panel discussion June 18, 6 PM CET to discuss about Roadrunner as the first Petaflops System. Don Grice will also speak within the maintent session on June 19th on the subject of "Milestones in Multicore Computing". In other key news, IBM will demonstrate the first time in Europe the new iDataPlex HPC nodes, specific high density-systems that target the HPC market segment for opportunities, where ultra-dense standards-based systems are requested. . iDataPlex is a new system that will be made to order and delivered fully integrated and ready to run from the factory to companies around the world. iDataPlex will use up to 40% less power and increase by up to 5 times the amount of computing that can be done on a single system in comparison to previous concepts. Furthermore, the recently announced IBM BladeCenter QS22 Cell Processor based blade server will be shown as an energy-efficient, compact HPC solution. Driven by growing commercial need for deep computing in areas such as financial services, digital media solutions and medical imaging, IBM has expanded its High Performance Computing capabilities for businesses with the introduction of this new system - a new, economical supercomputing technology inspired by advanced scientific research facilities. For the most challenging arithmetic operations, its new processor, the IBM PowerXCell 8i, offers five-times the speed of the original Cell/B.E. processor. The QS22 was developed by the IBM Boeblingen Development Lab and provides the accelerating compute node within the Roadrunner system. Within the ISC exhibition area at Booth C35-C38, IBM will present an overview of its current portfolio of HPC solutions, including also Blue Gene/P, the IBM POWER 575 System with POWER6 technology, and a BladeCenter H System incorporating AMD, Intel, POWER and Cell Processor-based blades: The IBM Blue Gene/P Solution is the second generation machine in IBM's Blue Gene program. It adheres to the key design strategies of the Blue Gene program, providing petaflop scale performance in a package that is efficient in term of power, cooling and floor space, thereby reducing the total cost of ownership. Compared to Blue Gene/L, its predecessor, Blue Gene/P extends performance through a doubling of processor cores and a frequency increase, and adds 4-way SMP functionality, hardware DMA, 10 Gb Ethernet, and aggressive power management. Blue Gene/P provides a standard programming environment and supports a wide range of IBM and open source software libraries and middleware. The IBM POWER 575 system offers extreme POWER6 performance in a scalable supercomputer building block with a 32-core SMP node and high density packaging with a 2U node and up to 448 cores per rack. It uses energy-efficient cooling technology and has an application affinity for weather and climate modeling, computational chemistry, physics, computer-aided engineering, computational fluid dynamics and petroleum exploration. Important events: The IBM press briefing at the ISC conference will be held June 18, 3.00 PM CET in conference room 2, level 2, including presentations from Dave Jursik, IBM VP Deep Computing Sales, and a number of experts from different parts of the IBM organization. IBM intends to hold a customer seminar session titled. "IBM High Performance Solutions: Innovations for Breakthrough Computing" in the morning of June 19, from 7.15 AM to 9.00 AM CET at the ISC conference room 5. A number of breakouts with IBM participation on June 18 and 19 will complement IBM's presence at the show. More information about IBM Deep Computing Solutions: its Web site.