Supercomputing on tour
Published: 26 Sep 2005 10:45 BST
Andrew Brockfield shies away from the term 'grudge match', but he concedes there's national pride involved as the race to build the world's fastest supercomputers continues to push the bar upwards at dizzying speed.
One of the products of that race — Blue Gene, a modular system that this year unseated Japan's long-reigning performance champ the Earth Simulator as the fastest computer in the world — recently spent several weeks at IBM's Melbourne offices before being transferred over the weekend to APAC '05, the high-performance computing (HPC) conference that kicks off on Monday on the Gold Coast.
Designed for portability, the Blue Gene system on display at the show — a one-eighth filled rack with 128 computing nodes containing 256 700MHz IBM PowerPC 440 processors — is just a shadow of the 65,536-processor Blue Gene/L, the world's fastest computer, whose 32 full racks provide 136.8 teraflops of computing power to simulate nuclear explosions at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) in the US. LLNL will soon take delivery of 32 more nodes, raising total computing power to around 270 teraflops and further widening the gap with Earth Simulator.
The TOP500 has become a barometer of computing progress, and high rankings are seen as merit badges of a sort — particularly for the likes of Intel, upon whose chips 333 of the TOP500 relatively inexpensive HPC systems are now running, up from virtually none just three years ago. Topping the charts is so important that the two-and-a-half-year domination of Japan's Earth Simulator spurred US government enquiries as to why that country had not dethroned its trans-Pacific neighbours.
IBM, whose Deep Blue technology succeeded in battling world chess champion Gary Kasparov to a draw several years ago, used that specialised technology as the basis of the five-year, $400m (£224m) R&D effort that begat Blue Gene and finally broke Earth Simulator's lock on the top spot.
A few years ago, just a few systems had reached 1 teraflop, but every current member of the official TOP500 list offers more than 1.1 teraflops. Even the scaled-down Blue Gene system at APAC '05 offers...
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