IBM triples performance of World's Fastest Computer and breaks the "Quadrillion" Barrier

At FZ Julich, where researchers have been using a Blue Gene/L machine for two years, a Blue Gene/P system will allow for more breakthrough science -- in such areas as particle physics and nanotech, for example -- while keeping the research facility within acceptable power budgets. "The big computing power at low electricity rates allows us to boost the performance of very complex and computationally intensive algorithms," said Thomas Lippert, director of the supercomputing center at FZ Julich.

Inside the Fastest Computer Ever Built

Like its predecessor, the Blue Gene/P supercomputer is a modular design, composed of "racks" that can be added as requirements grow.

Four IBM (850 MHz) PowerPC 450 processors are integrated on a single Blue Gene/P chip. Each chip is capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. A two-foot-by-two-foot board containing 32 of these chips churns out 435 billion operations every second, making it more powerful than a typical, 40-node cluster based on two-core commodity processors. Thirty-two of the compact boards comprise the 6-foot-high racks. Each rack runs at 13.9 trillion operations per second, 1,300 times faster than today's fastest home PC.

The one-petaflop Blue Gene/P supercomputer configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical network. The Blue Gene/P system can be scaled to an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster to achieve three-petaflop performance. A standard Blue Gene/P supercomputer configuration will house 4,096 processors per rack.

For Programmers, Friendlier Interfaces & Application Compatibility Speed Productivity

There are some key differences between Blue Gene/L and Blue Gene/P supercomputers. In hardware, the Blue Gene/P supercomputer moves to more (four vs two) and speedier (850 MHz vs 700 MHz) processors per chip; more memory and an SMP mode to support multi-threaded applications. This new SMP mode moves the Blue Gene/P system to a programming environment similar to that found in commercial clusters. The Blue Gene/P supercomputer dramatically scales up collective network performance to minimize common bottlenecks inherent in large parallel-computing systems. Software marks the third key upgrade for the Blue Gene/P solution -- system management, programming environment and applications support have all been refined in Blue Gene/P.

In Germany, a Blue Gene/P supercomputer will become the platform for new applications scaled for petaflop-level performance at the Max Planck society. "The next-generation Blue Gene system will improve our capacity to prepare, develop and optimize applications from the Max Planck Society for future peta-scale computing," said Hermann Lederer, head of application support at Max Planck's RZG/Garching Computing Center.

...continued