INDUSTRY

The Department of Energy said Wednesday IBM's Blue Gene/L has now performed 135.3 TFlops at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It has already topped a list of the TOP500 fastest supercomputers with a sustained performance of 70.7 TFlops. This new class of supercomputers is to be extended to a multitude of applications. IBM will continue its goal to build a petaflop-scale system for a range of projects in the life sciences. The architecture for Blue Gene/L is expected to be more easily adaptable to commercial applications, and promises to be more affordable to business users than the leading-edge supercomputers found at national laboratories. This new approach to supercomputing promises to make the dramatic reductions in power consumption, cost and space requirements needed to turn massively parallel computing into a practical tool for industry. As part of the expansion of the Blue Gene project, IBM is designing a system targeted to data-intensive applications commonly found in commercial computing. The latest performance increase was achieved by doubling the number of racks in the system to 32. If the design continues on this path, the final machine with 64 racks will perform at about 270 TFlops this year. Each rack contains 1,024 processors. Each processor, a special variant of IBM's Power family, has dual-processing engines called cores. For running the basic performance test used to rank the TOP500 supercomputers, each core can perform calculation work, but in many tasks one of the cores will be devoted to communications. Blue Gene began in 2000 as a research project to build a system that could perform 1 quadrillion calculations per second--a petaflop--but IBM is trying to make a business out of the machine. It's begun selling the Blue Gene/L machines for about $2 million per rack and is renting out access to one of its own machines. Blue Gene/L is one of several products stemming from IBM's focus on high-performance technical computing. IBM has said the full system will be installed by May, and Livermore Lab spokesman Don Johnston said it should be up and running in July. Livermore's Blue Gene/L initially was expected to be used for nonclassified work, but its mission expanded to include weapons research as the lab realized it could be useful there too, Johnston said. The supercomputer has been used to simulate the interactions of 16 million atoms in a sample of tantalum that's solidifying under pressure, but Blue Gene/L isn't suited for all supercomputing tasks. DOE purchased Blue Gene/L as part of a $290 million deal that also included a system now called ASCI Purple. Purple uses fewer, more-powerful processors with more memory, a design that makes it better suited to its primary purpose: complex simulations of nuclear weapons physics. ASCI Purple is based on p5-575 servers. IBM will start delivering ASCI Purple to the Livermore lab in April, and it should be complete in July or August, Johnston said. The future of US supercomputing will benefit tremendously from pursuing both of these paths in parallel.