Currently the fastest supercomputer in Europe, the Jugene can process one trillion operations per second, has 294,912 cores that comprise 32-bit PowerPC 450 processors at 850 MHz, has 144 terabytes of RAM, has a bandwidth of 5.1 gigabyte/second with a mere 160 nanosecond latency, and is one heck of a machine mounted on 72 racks. I wouldn't mind having one of these in my basement regardless of the power bill. For pictures and more information, read the linked article.
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2009-04-27
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Looking at the amount of memory I have put into servers over the last 21 years, it has roughly doubled every 2 years.
If things continue at that geometric rate, I'll be ordering a 144 terabyte server (and wondering if it's enough) in about 35 years, somewhere around my 81st birthday.
Looking at it another way, 35 years *ago* it was 1974. I was in the 6th grade. And my Apple ][+, with 48k, was still 6 years in the future.
Jugene packs some power in a remarkably timeless way. For this industry, of course.
Edited 2009-06-28 04:47 UTC
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Judging by what I've read about previous Blue Gene systems, it probably runs 2 operating systems, their are I/O nodes ('fileservers') and compute nodes. Only the I/O nodes run Linux (for Lustre cluster-filesystem to be precice), The compute nodes actually run something custom build by IBM for running on these kinds of clusters, but it has been made Linux API compatible for easier programming. So yes you could say it runs Suse Linux, but their probably isn't anything Suse specific in their. I presume their is actually very little 'userland' on the I/O nodes. Maybe even the uncompressed kernel would be almost as much.
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2008-08-25
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Stupid question but, why not intel?
Surely intel would get a better bang:buck ratio? I mean, look at Apple.
Intel sure wanted you to think they had a better bang:buck ratio for a long time, until they themselves encountered trouble ramping the Gigahertz any further up the ladder. These days they're singing the old tune their competitors used to sing: it's not the speed that matters after all.
After all, it isn't a better bang:buck ratio, especially when you factor in things like power consumption (which, on a super computer, matters quite a lot).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation#PowerPC
Apple's main issue with PowerPC, as I understand it, wasn't so much the clock speeds, as IBM's and Freescale's abilities to produce reliable chips in the mass quantities that Apple needed. Freescale, for example, makes so much money on the embedded market that Apple is more of a distraction for them. As for IBM, well... they did produce the Cell processor that powers the PS3.
Apple's other issue with PowerPC was the fact that the desktop world is an x86 cult. A lot of software simply wasn't produced for the PowerPC desktops, and people refused to do it because of the economies of scale. By going x86, Apple can provide Boot Camp and run that stuff anyway, in a way similar to how I ran a Microsoft Word application on Linux earlier today. You can't do that on PPC easily.
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Given that freescale has been on life support for the better part of this decade, I don't think the term "they were making so much more money on the embedded market" can thread that much water.
Freescale did not have the resources to compete in the desktop/high end processor field. And the volume from intel is such, that IBM can barely keep up in that space either.
In the end it wasn't as much as Apple decided to move to intel out of their own accord, as much as it was freescale/IBM no longer interested in keeping up with intel in that space of the market.
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Not for this application I'm guessing. When dealing with these kinds of systems, you should remember that moving data around and it's latency is probably the most important performance bottleneck, the processor is probably a whole lot less of an issue. Also did you see in the pictures how tightly packed they are ? Do you know how much heat faster powered processors would generate ?:
http://www.fz-juelich.de/jsc/datapool/jugene/BGP_nodecards.large.jp...
Edited 2009-07-01 07:50 UTC
