Tuesday, July 3, 2007

आईबीएम :the world of supercomputing with Blue Gene/P





























IBM has announced its latest entry in the world of supercomputing with Blue Gene/P. The machine takes over the mantle of world's fastest computer from its predecessor Blue Gene/L - 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 crunch through 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 came out in November; four were in the top 10.
Blue Gene/P is three times more powerful than the current fastest machine, BlueGene/L, also built by IBM. 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 machine is considered 'green,' as it is claimed to be seven times less power-hungry than Blue Gene/L. Its design uses many small low-power chips, each connected through five specialized networks inside the system. The company claims BlueGene/P to be the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built.
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.
Research laboratories across America and in Germany have already placed orders with IBM for the supercomputer, with the first installation to be completed for the US Department of Energy.
Two further machines are planned for US laboratories and a fourth has been bought by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council for its Daresbury Laboratory Cheshire.
The ultra powerful machines will be used for complex simulations to study fields as varied as particle physics to nanotechnology.
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 have3,288 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.