The race to build powerful supercomputer keeps going on. IBM has now launched Blue Gene/P which is the supposedly the world’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer. The machine takes over the mantle of world's fastest computer from its predecessor Blue Gene/L, also from IBM, by trebling its performance. The new Blue Gene computers form a part of Big Blue's supercomputing portfolio.
The world's biggest IT services company has built almost half of the 500 fastest supercomputers. It is also building a supercomputer for US department of energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico.
Codenamed Roadrunner, it is expected to do 1.6 thousand trillion calculations per second. The development of Blue Gene/P seems to guarantee IBM another year atop the Top 500 Supercomputing list. IBM had 93 computers on the list when the rankings last announced in November; four were in the top 10.
Blue Gene/P is three times more powerful than the current fastest machine, BlueGene/L. The machine is designed to continuously operate at more than one petaflop in real-world situations. And it can be configured to reach speeds of 3 petaflop.
This makes the machine roughly 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC. The company claims that the new Blue Gene can process more operations in one second than the combined grunt of a stack of laptops nearly 2.5 kilometres high.
IBM says the scientific ramifications of this level of power are massive, and would allow researchers to model an entire human organ to determine drug reaction. Like the most other modern supercomputers, Blue Gene/P is composed of several racks of servers joined together in clusters for large computing tasks.
Currently the most powerful machine is Blue Gene/L, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The machine used to ensure that the US nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable, has achieved 280.6 teraflops or trillions of calculations per second. The machine packs 131,072 processors and is theoretically capable of reaching 367 teraflops.
The specs packs four IBM 850 MHz PowerPC 450 processors integrated on a single chip. Each of these chips is capable of running 13.6 billion operations every second.
A board containing 32 chips churning out 435 billion operations ever second. There are 32 boards in each six-foot rack, with each rack running at 13.9 trillion operations per second.
The one-petaflop configuration is a 294,912 processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high speed optical network.The Blue Gene/P can be scaled to an 884,736 processor, 216-rack cluster to hit the three-petaflop mark.
Rival Sun Microsystems too is aiming to get amongst the supercomputer race, with its Constellation system. The Constellation machine will be able to run at a maximum speed of 1.7 petaflops.
The machine will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD's forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades. Sun estimates that Constellation could scale to a 2 PFLOP system with 1 exabyte of disk capacity.
The first Constellation machine, called Ranger, is being put together for the University of Texas at Austin and will run at a modest 500 teraflops. |
