IBM’s project “Kittyhawk” is aiming to build a collosal computer, that is capable “of hosting the entire internet as an application.” Or to cite Nicholas Carr: one computer to rule them all
We hypothesize that for a large class of web-scale workloads the Blue Gene/P platform is an order of magnitude more efficient to purchase and operate than the commodity clusters in use today. Driven by scientific computing demands the Blue Gene designers pursued an aggressive system-on-a-chip methodology that led to a scalable platform composed of air-cooled racks. Each rack contains more than a thousand independent computers with highspeed interconnects inside and between racks. We postulate that the same demands of efficiency and density apply to web-scale platforms. This project aims to develop the system software to enable Blue Gene/P as a generic platform capable of being used by heterogeneous workloads. We describe our firmware and operating system work to provide Blue Gene/P with generic system software, one of the results of which is the ability to run thousands of heterogeneous Linux instances connected by TCP/IP networks over the high-speed internal interconnects.
(read the IBM Research white paper)
Credit: golem.de
IBM’s unique Blue Gene design has attracted a lot of attention from national labs and other major HPC customers. In fact, four of the 10 fastest supercomputers on the planet rely on the Blue Gene architecture, including the world’s fastest machine: the Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The older Blue Gene/P system combines hundreds and thousands of low-power processor cores to make a single box. A typical configuration would include four 850MHz PowerPC cores arranged in a system-on-a-chip model with built-in memory and interconnect controllers. You can take 32 of these “nodes” and pop them onto a card. Then you have 16 of those cards slot into a midplane. Each server rack has two midplanes, leaving you with 1024 nodes and 2TB of memory. In theory, you can connect up to 16,384 racks, providing up to 67.1m cores with 32PB of memory.
(The Register’s Ashlee Vance)
Wow – things like this really strain my imaginativeness! Let’s see what will become of this super computer …
