IBM developing 10 petaflop supercomputer, Power7 to ship next year
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted December 7th 2009 4:59PM
posted December 7th 2009 4:59PM
The last we heard, IBM was hard at work on its Power7 processor. Now the company's announcing that the thirty-two core chip -- and copious amounts of eDRAM -- are at the heart of its newest supercomputing project. To be housed at the University of Illinois, IBM's Blue Waters will be the largest publicly accessible supercomputer in the world when it goes online in 2011, theoretically capable of achieving 16 petaflop speeds by connecting up to 16,384 Power7 nodes, although IBM said that initially the theoretical peak performance will likely be closer to 10 petaflops -- with more realistic sustained real-world performance near one petaflop. To keep things from overheating, a system was devised that includes water-cooling for the whole rack, including the processor itself. But why should government agencies and large corporations have all the fun? According to CNET, IBM plans to ship Power7 processors with commercial server products sometime next year.
?!? wow...so they are going to jump the Cray XT5's 1.5Pf by nearly 10 times in under a year? I'll believe it when i see it.
Exactly what he said!
And now, cue the "GPU's can do it better lol" trolls.
This is Cool Stuff. Should square up rather well against Nehalem, just like when POWER6 blew everything in existence at that time out of the water.
@Kira
Would certainly explain the Blue Waters part.
@Kira it comes down to what kind of math you want to do. Super Computers are made for one thing, full spectrum integer and float NUMBER CRUNCHING.
GPU's have specialized FPU that are pre-optimized for equations that commonly appear in games and 3d rendering. If they are preforming equations that they are good at and optimized for, YES they will be faster (if compared head to head number of cores).
If they are testing a theoretical equation that no one has ever construed before (you know, things that people who actually use super computers do) hands down the super computer will be better at it.
you are comparing apples to oranges, don't try and start a flame war.
@(Unverified)
Not trying to start a flamewar. Merely remembering many Engadget discussions about how amazingly awesome GPUs' floating-point numbers are when, as you correctly point out, they're very limited-use devices and will never totally replace general-purpose supercomputers.
@(Unverified)
"it comes down to what kind of math you want to do. Super Computers are made for one thing, full spectrum integer and float NUMBER CRUNCHING."
Actually, gpus are better at number crunching(floating point and integer). They even do double precision math on newer ones. By full spectrum number crunching, do you mean addition, subtraction, multiplication and division? GPUs handle all these operations fine. What they aren't good at is complex logic. since GPUs do say 1000 operations at the same time, you can't halt the number crunching at calculation #500 and start a different routine based on a computer programmed decision.
"If they are testing a theoretical equation that no one has ever construed before (you know, things that people who actually use super computers do) hands down the super computer will be better at it."
Umm, GPUs can calculate the result of pretty much any equation and faster than cpus (when that equation is calculated multiple times). CPUs would be better at doing it a few times and then moving on to some other required task.
10 Petaflops? What is that, a measure of animal cruelty? Eh? Eh?
@(Unverified) 4/10
@(Unverified)
5/10 cuze you're special like all the other users too lazy to verify their names.
@(Unverified) -_-
Please use a sans-serif font in your posts Engadget!! My eyes are bleeding!
@Streetfights dude, get over it... they're not going to change it just because you whine on every post.
What are they doing with this kind of processing power? Mapping out the brain?
@werty1432k Folding of course. Can you imagine the PPD?
@werty1432k
well they do have the gigantic Beckham Institue here at the university of illinois, who knows, maybe the geniouses here at the cognitive science research facilities might get a piece of the IBM love.
@werty1432k Given the cooling solution they are obviously using it as a front for a hot springs resort.
Has nothing on the Intel Atom...
GPUs are good but they can't compute the rate of decay your nuclear arsenal; these chips can. With this kind of processing power they will be able to fold DNA, predict weather, find large prime numbers etc. All important stuff. I'm glad that a University is getting it instead of another big government agency.
@kurtnelle
My nuclear arsenal is embarrassingly small, you could calculate rate of decay on a casio calculator watch.
@kurtnelle Since the new GPU's are fully IEEE math complaint, and since they didn't even have computers when they made the first nukes, I'm sure a GPU can manage fine.
Also decay is steady and predictable and requires no calculations does it?
My dream of running Crysis at 100 fps can now be fulfilled.
@Dudeman
Dam your were too fast for me. I was gonna ask if it can run crysis XDDDD
@Dudeman
umm 100fps?? you mean 10000 fps?
@Dudeman maybe on medium settings..
2011? And they just hit the 1Petaflop barrier recently. 10-16 times the performance in a mere year and a bit, thats just staggering.
Side note, its too bad IBM doesnt make consumer processors anymore, the specs for the Power7 are really something to gawk at.
# 45 nm process, 567mm2
# 4.04 GHz clock speed
# max 2 chips per multi chip module
* 4, 6 or 8 cores per chip
o 4 SMT threads per core
o 12 execution units per core:
+ 2 fixed-point units
+ 2 load/store units
+ 4 double-precision floating-point units
+ 1 vector unit supporting VSX
+ 1 decimal floating-point unit
+ 1 branch unit
+ 1 condition register unit
So think about that...8 cores a chip, 4 threads a core, two chips per module. Geekgasm? Yes.
@Nitesh 45 nm process....too big.
So we can we expect Apple to go running back to Power processors?
@Jordan Not unless Apple move into the heavy-duty server market, no.
(Oh yeah. Xserve. Right. No.)
@Jordan Not a chance, their marketshare rose sharply after the transition to x86. Moving back would be counterproductive.
@Nitesh
plus IBM won't be able to make enough of them for Apple unlike Intel has more foundries than IBM. This could be the next serial processor for Playstation coupled with a graphics chip like evergreen or fermi...
Power7!!!
hope that goes in the PS4
can't wait for the next gen
@onQ
It's designed for Windows 7.
Picture from the British remake of Pi?
With 1 Petabyte of pr0n able to generate 10 Petafaps per second. My God! This is the holy grail.
I hope the IT department doesn't use this for searching for aliens.
@pgriffin24
i kinda hope they do!
@monkeyontherun4 What you mean like running SETI@Home on it?
@(Unverified)
I think he's referring to that newstory about the IT guy of that school district who ran SETI on 5000 computers and then some fat woman on the board found out and went ape.
Seriously, this 10 petaflops is just calculating the theoretical limit by # of cpus X individual flops. If you did this with Radeon 5870s, you would only need 4000 chips at a cost of ~1.6 million. Obviously,that number isn't that meaningful. What is probably just as important is how fast do the nodes talk to each other.
I think I see SkyNet getting jealous.
@Maeztro
nah, Skynet runs on everything it's a viral A.I. OS
Hell Yeah UIUC =D may not have done great with football this season but at least we have the to-be best supercomputer
@pdonket
We Engineers always make up for the football team
@matamor1
Very true, what's your major? I'm a freshman EE
@pdonket Freshmen in EE as well here.
I was just wondering today why MIT gets all the media love... hahahahaha well we deserve it, our engineering program is WAYYYY too quite about its great achievements.
@matamor1
quiet*
random pointless Blue Waters update: I live about 2-3 miles from the blue-waters project building they are building. several weeks ago I noticed at least one entire wall of the building was painted bright teal/blue, it was painted over a couple days later, but at least I can say that the Blue-Waters building was actually blue.
At least thats not as bad as the walmart here: there is a RedBox painted bright blue. not joking
Besides my English 101 final, the above comment was the stupidest thing I have ever typed
While it will be the fastest publicly-accessible supercomputer in the world when it launches, it will only actually do sustained performance of 1 petaflop.