Supercomputing on tour
Published: 26 Sep 2005 10:45 BST
...1.4 teraflops. Ready availability of such immense computing power has transformed complex modelling in scientific research, such as biotechnology and astrophysics, as well as computationally intense industries such as petroleum exploration.
Scientists and researchers are finding Blue Gene's power so appealing, in fact, that IBM is now mass-producing the systems (in a relative sense; only 16 of the machines currently exist) from its Rochester, Minnesota server factory. For around $2.5m you can have one of your own — and a growing number of companies are jumping at the chance.
"The range of applications Blue Gene is suited to is not as broad as [generic] Power PC, Intel or AMD based architectures," says Brockfield, an HPC specialist who has stewarded the Blue Gene system during its Australian tour. "Bear in mind that it was first designed as a pure research project, and when we first designed the machine we didn't think astrophysics would be an application domain for Blue Gene. We've been pleasantly surprised at the breadth of applications that Blue Gene is suited to."
Scientists must rewrite much of their code to work on Blue Gene, but that hasn't hurt its popularity. During its Australian tour, the demonstration system has been flat-out running tasks from local scientists involved with regional HPC groups including Victorian PAC and Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing, at whose conference the system is being displayed.
Just as significant as the systems' computing power, however, is its portability: drawing less than one-tenth of the power of a conventional Intel-based system, the demonstration unit is cool enough to run quite happily on the APAC '05 exhibition floor without any of the specialising cooling systems found in conventional data centres. Blue Gene is more than 60 percent cooler than power-hungry Intel-based servers, which run hot enough that cooling the systems has become more complicated than building them.
HPC giants aren't sitting on their laurels. With 32 additional Blue Gene nodes soon set to double Blue Gene/L's performance to 270 teraflops, experts are now pondering HPC's next goal: the petaflop computer enough to handle seemingly impossibly complex computations such as modelling of protein folding within the body. Brockfield can't say when Blue Gene/P, as it's now known, will be delivered — but with Japan already planning a retaliatory strike on Blue Gene/L, odds are that it won't be long.
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