Almost every technology publication carried a story these last two days about the $290 million contract that IBM won with the US Department of Energy. If you click on the title of this column, you'll read an article by Stephen Shankland, from CNET News.com.
But I borrowed parts of this title: Dan Stober, from the San Jose Mercury News, is a contender for my "Best Title of the Month" award. It doesn't mean anything, but it sounds good, and it's funny. His real title was a little bit more *mainstream*: "IBM supercomputers to be the world's quickest."
Now, let's go back to Stephen Shankland's report because it's the only article that I read which mentions there are three -- and not two -- separate deals..
The first one is *small*: 944 x335servers and 32 x345 machines. If this is small -- but apparently valued at $33 million -- let's take a look at the two other deals.
ASCI Purple, due to be running by the end of 2004, is expected to have 196 interconnected 64-processor servers, making a total of 12,544 Power5 chips. It will come with 50 terabytes of memory -- about 20,000 times as much as a PC. The supercomputer also will have IBM disk storage arrays holding 2 petabytes, or a quadrillion bytes, of data -- about 50,000 times the capacity of a PC.
As for physical size, ASCI Purple will weigh about 197 tons, be linked to 119 miles of optical cable and 28 miles of copper cable, and occupy 8,900 square feet of floor space--or about two basketball courts. It will consume 4.7 megawatts of power, enough current for 4,000 homes, according to IBM.
The peak speed of ASCI Purple should approach 100 teraflops.
The Blue Gene Light -- a.k.a. Blue Gene/L -- is an entirely different beast. Blue Gene/L will have 65,636 computing nodes, or slightly more than 130,000 processors, running Linux.
Blue Gene/L is one step in IBM's ongoing project to build a machine by 2007 that can perform a quadrillion calculations per second -- a "petaflop." The task of the ultimate Blue Gene computer will be to predict the folding of proteins, the large biological molecules that are assembled from genetic information encoded in DNA
Blue Gene/L peak speed may reach 360 teraflops.
In "This Is Your Computer on Brains," Michelle Delio says that "ASCI Purple and Blue Gene/L will do things that no brain can do."
Blue Gene/L will be used for scientific research such as predicting global climate change and studying the behavior of super explosives. The supercomputer will be used by three laboratories -- Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore -- and the Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative University Alliance collaborators.
ASCI Purple's primary purpose will be to simulate the aging and operation of U.S. nuclear weapons, ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's stockpile without the need for underground testing.
Back to Dan Stober: he warns us that Blue Gene/L peak speed might not be attainable.
Blue Gene is the more "high risk, high payoff" of the two supercomputers, said Bruce Goodwin, a physicist who directs the nuclear weapons program at the Livermore lab. Its target speed of 360 teraflops, or 360 trillion calculations per second, "is not a guaranteed thing," he said.
Sources: Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com, November 18, 2002; Dan Stober, San Jose Mercury News, November 18, 2002; Michelle Delio, Wired News, November 19, 2002
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