Blue Gene/L

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-11-24 02:20pm

Not sure if anyone knows this, but IBM has constructed a neat little computer about the size of a television that gets 2TeraFLOPS. The worlds fastest computer, the Earth Simulator, gets 40TeraFLOPS and is the size of a gymnasium. IBM is building a supercomputer out f its Blue Gene computers, to get a whopping peak og 360TeraFLOPS. My personal hope is that the low power consumption, high density computing technology will become cheaper over the years until a single motherboard with the capability of modern PCs could be fit into a box no bigger then a modern harddrive. Opinions?

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-11-24 02:29pm

I might have posted this earlier along with news on VA Tech's PPC970 cluster.

As for the power of a modern PC in a 5.25" drive, it will eventually be possible. Look how powerful a modern PocketPC or PalmOS device is - Toshiba even has a 480x640 device out now!

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-11-24 02:48pm

The important part is that its made to be cheap. the real innovation isn't so much the size of the processing units so much as the main board itself. After all, laptops can have huge capabilities for a relatively small space. Remove the video cards, batteries, etc. and you'll have a neat small little computer. The main board, tho, holds 32 motherboard cards and fits on a rack. Thats huuuuuge. I imagine, tho, that in order to shrink the things down, they'll have to make the processor boards into continuous chip media, so that instead of being smaller chips interconnected on a board, it'll be a single solid chip with integrated controllers, buses, memory, etc.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-11-24 04:00pm

You're more or less describing a blade server.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-11-24 04:03pm

show me.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-11-24 04:36pm

You would do well to look something up than cry "show me" or "I don't understand!" when someone tells you something you don't know about or understand. Learning is not having someone spoon-feed you information.

Blade servers aren't quite as dense as you want, but they're broadly similar in concept.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-11-24 05:15pm

The reason i asked you to show me was because I had looked and didnt find anything as dense as I described, nor were they denser then the Blue Gene technology.

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2003-11-24 05:28pm

kojikun wrote:The reason i asked you to show me was because I had looked and didnt find anything as dense as I described, nor were they denser then the Blue Gene technology.

Blue Gene technology? It is simply a series of IBM Power5 blades hooked together with high speed fiber. This is EXACTLY what phongn was talking about.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-11-24 05:57pm

uh? whered you get this bit of information?

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-11-24 07:29pm

The Kernel wrote:
kojikun wrote:The reason i asked you to show me was because I had looked and didnt find anything as dense as I described, nor were they denser then the Blue Gene technology.
Blue Gene technology? It is simply a series of IBM Power5 blades hooked together with high speed fiber. This is EXACTLY what phongn was talking about.

Actually, no. Blue Gene uses the PPC440 instead, probably due to heat and power concerns. You are correct that it is essentially a blade, abliet without the usual hot-swap nodes.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2003-11-25 02:00pm

BlueGene is remarkably dense, even compared to blade servers. I've not seen anything equally dense - 32 processors per rack, two processors on a single processor card.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-11-25 02:11pm

That's because most blades are hot-swappable and have some management functions - and that means they can't cram as many boards into a chassis as BG/L.