IBM details one petaflop supercomputer

IBM is shedding light on a programme to create the world's fastest supercomputer, illuminating a dual-pronged strategy, an unusual new processor design and a proclivity for the Linux operating system.

"Blue Gene" is an ambitious project to expand the horizons of supercomputing, with the ultimate goal of creating a system that can perform one quadrillion calculations per second, or one petaflop. IBM expects a machine it calls Blue Gene/P to be the first to achieve the computational milestone. Today's fastest machine, NEC's Earth Simulator is comparatively slow - about one-thirtieth of a petaflop - but fast enough to worry the United States government that the country is losing its computing lead to Japan.

"Blue Gene is a completely oddball, you've-never-seen-anything-like-this-before design," said Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice. "It is not custom everything, (but) it is still very exotic compared to anything you can buy."

IBM has begun building the chips that will be used in the first Blue Gene, a machine dubbed Blue Gene/L that will run Linux and have more than 65,000 computing nodes, said Bill Pulleyblank, director of IBM's Deep Computing Institute and the executive overseeing the project. Each node has a small chip with an unusually large number of functions crammed onto the single slice of silicon: two processors, four accompanying mathematical engines, 4MB of memory and communication systems for five separate networks.

Joining Blue Gene/L is a second major experimental system called "Cyclops," which in comparison will have many more processors etched onto each slice of silicon - perhaps as many as 64, Pulleyblank said.

In addition, IBM probably will use the Linux operating system on all the members of the Blue Gene family, not just Blue Gene/L. "My belief is that's definitely where we're going to go," Pulleyblank said.

Blue Gene's original mission was to tackle the computationally onerous task of using the laws of physics to predict how chains of biochemical building blocks described by DNA fold into proteins - massive molecules such as hemoglobin or testosterone. IBM has expanded its mission, though, to other subjects including global climate simulation and financial risk analysis.

"We're looking at broad suite of applications," Pulleyblank said, a move that will help IBM reach one of the goals of the Blue Gene project: to produce technology that customers ultimately will pay for.

IBM already has spent more than the original $100m budgeted for the project and won't meet its 2004 goal for the ultimate machine, but the company has made progress bringing its ideas to fruition.

IBM is building the processors for the first member of the Blue Gene family, Blue Gene/L, and expects to use them this year in a machine that will be a microcosm of the eventual fully fledged Blue Gene/L due by the end of 2004, Pulleyblank said. IBM also has begun designing the processors for Cyclops, which IBM internally calls Blue Gene/C.

The performance results of Blue Gene/L and Cyclops will determine the design IBM chooses for the eventual petaflop machine, Blue Gene/P, Pulleyblank said.

"The only thing that's sure is it will be an... architecture that will have massive amounts of parallelism in it. It will be a very power-efficient, space-efficient design," Pulleyblank said. How IBM reaches its petaflop-and-beyond goal is "going to depend in large part on what we find out when we start running on Blue Gene/L."

Blue Gene/L will be large, but significantly smaller than current IBM supercomputers such as ASCI White, a nuclear weapons simulation machine at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which will also be the home of Blue Gene/L. ASCI White takes up the area of two basketball courts, or 9,400 square feet, while Blue Gene/L should fit into half a tennis court, or about 1,400 square feet.

Stephen Shankland writes for News.com