IBM finalises petascale HPC system contract

IBM HAS NAILED DOWN the US contract for a 200,000 CPU-core supercomputer named Blue Waters to be built for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, which will run at a sustained one petaflops.

A "flops" is one floating-point operation per second and "peta" means a quadrillion, which is 1,000 trillion. Depending upon whether you like to count using ten digits or prefer to count in binary, "peta" means either 10^15, that is, 1 followed by 15 zeros, or 2^50, which equals 1,125,899,906,842,624. Counting either way, "peta" is a very big number and one petaflops of bits-munching capacity in one integral system represents massive computational power.

The NCSA says Blue Waters will be first supercomputer complex capable of delivering sustained petascale performance running scientific and engineering applications. In addition to having petaflops number-crunching power, Blue Waters will feature more than a petabyte of memory and over 10 petabytes of disk storage. All of its memory and disk storage will be globally accessible by all processors, promising faster high performance computing (HPC). Did we mention that this monster will have 200,000 processor cores?

Funded by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Blue Waters HPC facility is expected to begin operations in 2011.

The Blue Waters system will be constructed by IBM using its PERCS technology developed for the High Productivity Computing Systems project that's sponsored by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is the American military-industrial complex combination shadowy think tank, experimental skunk works and sugar daddy that sponsored the early development research that led to what we now call the Internet.

PERCS stands for IBM's "Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computer System," which is based its Power7 processor, AIX operating system which is its proprietary version of UNIX, and its General Parallel File System. IBM's development of PERCS required research and development work on new chip and interconnect technology, new operating system features, and innovations in compilation and programming environments. It will support both commercial and technical applications.

The NSF says Blue Waters may be used for the study of complex natural processes like the interaction of solar coronal mass ejections with Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere, the formation and evolution of galaxies, and chains of events in living cells, as well as for the design of new materials. NCSA director Thom Dunning, a chemistry professor at the University of Illinois, added research on disease outbreaks and new medicines, weather forecasting and simulation, and engineering problems to the list of possible applications.

The NSF also says that by about 2010 or 2011, researchers will be able to access a mix of HPC systems that deliver sustained performance in the 10 teraflops to 2 petaflops range. It anticipates that those systems will run a variety of science and engineering applications integrated into a national cyber-infrastructure that will be supported at national, regional and academic institutional campus levels.

It will be interesting to see whether it's Blue Waters or some other HPC system presently in the planning stages that will overtake the currently fastest supercomputer on the Top 500 rankings, which is IBM's $100 million Roadrunner system installed recently at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. µ

See Also
New top 500 supercomputer list tips up
IBM Cell pushes US military supercomputer past one petaflops

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