29-03-2011, 02:56 PM
Presented By:
Shikha Mulley
[attachment=11260]
• Introduction
The word "supercomputer" entered the mainstream lexicon in 1996 and 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer challenged the world chess champion in two tournaments broadcast around the world.
Since then, IBM has been busy improving its supercomputer technology and tackling much deeper problems.
Their latest project, code named Blue Gene, is poised to shatter all records for computer and network performance.
• What is a Super Computer?
A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.
Today, supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience.
• Why we need Super Computers?
Supercomputers are very useful in highly calculation-intensive tasks such as
• Problems involving quantum physics,
• Weather forecasting,
• Climate research,
• Molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals),
• Physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion).
• Why we need Super Computers?
• Also, they are useful for a particular class of problems, known as Grand Challenge problems, full solution for such problems require semi-infinite computing resources.
• NASA’s Linux-based Super Computer
Why Supercomputers are Fast
Several elements of a supercomputer contribute to its high level of performance:
– Numerous high-performance processors (CPUs) for parallel processing
– Specially-designed high-speed internal networks
– Specially-designed or tuned operating systems
• What is Blue gene?
Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several supercomputers that are designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS = 1015) range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS (teraFLOPS = 1012).
It is a cooperative project among IBM(particularly IBM Rochester and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy (which is partially funding the project), and academia.
• Why Blue Gene?
Blue Gene is an IBM Research project dedicated to exploring the
frontiers in supercomputing:
- in computer architecture,
- in the software required to program and control massively parallel systems, and
- in the use of computation to advance the understanding of important biological processes such as protein folding.
Learning more about biomolecular mechanisms is expected to give medical researchers better understanding of diseases, as well as potential cures.
• Why the name Blue gene?
“Blue” - The corporate color of IBM
“Gene” - The intended use of the Blue Gene clusters was for Computational biology.
• Blue Gene Projects
There are four Blue Gene projects in development:
- Blue Gene/L,
- Blue Gene/C,
- Blue Gene/P, and
- Blue Gene/Q.
• Blue Gene/L
The first computer in the Blue Gene series, is Blue Gene/L.
It is developed through a partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
The term Blue Gene/L sometimes refers to the computer installed at LLNL; and sometimes refers to the architecture of that computer.
As of November 2006, there are 27 computers on the Top500 list using the Blue Gene/L architecture.
• Blue Gene/L Super Computer
• History of Blue gene/L
In December 1999, IBM announced a $100 million research initiative for a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena.
The project has two main goals:
- to advance understanding of the biomolecular mechanisms via large-scale simulation, and
- to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software
• History of Blue gene/L
In November 2001, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory joined IBM as a research partner for Blue Gene.
Blue Gene/L is also the first supercomputer ever to run over 100 TFLOPS sustained on a real world application.
This achievement won the 2005 Gordon Bell Prize.
In November 2007, the LLNL Blue Gene/L remained at the number one spot as the world's fastest supercomputer.
• Blue Gene/L Architecture
Each compute node has two 700MHz PowerPC 440 embedded processors
Each of the dual processors on the compute node has two "floating point units (FPU)," engines for performing mathematical calculations.
The dual FPUs give each Blue Gene/L node a theoretical peak performance of 5.6GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS).
• Blue Gene/L Architecture
Compute nodes are packaged two per compute card, with 16 compute cards plus up to 2 I/O nodes per node board.
There are 32 node boards per cabinet/rack.
By integration of all essential sub-systems on a single chip, each Compute or I/O node dissipates low power (about 17 watts, including DRAMs).
• One Blue Gene/L nodeboard
• Blue Gene/C (Cyclops64)
Blue Gene/C (now renamed to Cyclops64) is a sister-project to Blue Gene/L.
It is a massively parallel, supercomputer-on-a-chip cellular architecture.
The Cyclops64 project aims to create the first "supercomputer on a chip".
• Blue Gene/C (Cyclops64)
Cyclops64 exposes much of the underlying hardware to the programmer, allowing the programmer to write very high performance, finely tuned software.
One negative consequence is that efficiently programming Cyclops64 is difficult.
The theoretical peak performance of a Cyclops64 chip is 80 gigaflops
• Blue Gene/P
On June 26, 2007, IBM unveiled Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the Blue Gene supercomputer.
Designed to run continuously at 1PFLOPS (petaFLOPS), it can be configured to reach speeds in excess of 3 PFLOPS.
It is at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer, accomplished by using many small, low-power chips connected through five specialized networks.
• Blue Gene/P Architecture
Four 850 MHz PowerPC 450 processors are integrated on each Blue Gene/P chip.
The 1-PFLOPS Blue Gene/P configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical network.
Blue Gene/P can be scaled to an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster to achieve 3-PFLOPS performance.
A standard Blue Gene/P configuration will house 4,096 processors per rack.
• Blue Gene/Q
The last known supercomputer design in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/Q is aimed to reach 20 Petaflops in the 2011 time frame.
It will continue to expand and enhance the Blue Gene/L and /P architectures with higher frequency at much improved performance per watt.
• Conclusion
President Obama recognized IBM and its Blue Gene family of supercomputers with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
The influence of the Blue Gene supercomputer's energy-efficient design and computing model can be seen today across the Information Technology industry.
Today, 18 of the top 20 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world are built on IBM high performance computing technology.
Blue Gene has some unusual features, but IBM has tried as much as possible to anchor the system to more mainstream technology.
Blue Gene would influence the way in which mainstream computers of the future are built.
Staying on the beaten path is the best way to take advantage of technology that's improving fastest, and it also makes it easier to create products out of the Blue Gene research.
Shikha Mulley
[attachment=11260]
• Introduction
The word "supercomputer" entered the mainstream lexicon in 1996 and 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer challenged the world chess champion in two tournaments broadcast around the world.
Since then, IBM has been busy improving its supercomputer technology and tackling much deeper problems.
Their latest project, code named Blue Gene, is poised to shatter all records for computer and network performance.
• What is a Super Computer?
A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation.
Today, supercomputers are typically one-of-a-kind custom designs produced by "traditional" companies such as Cray, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, who had purchased many of the 1980s companies to gain their experience.
• Why we need Super Computers?
Supercomputers are very useful in highly calculation-intensive tasks such as
• Problems involving quantum physics,
• Weather forecasting,
• Climate research,
• Molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals),
• Physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion).
• Why we need Super Computers?
• Also, they are useful for a particular class of problems, known as Grand Challenge problems, full solution for such problems require semi-infinite computing resources.
• NASA’s Linux-based Super Computer
Why Supercomputers are Fast
Several elements of a supercomputer contribute to its high level of performance:
– Numerous high-performance processors (CPUs) for parallel processing
– Specially-designed high-speed internal networks
– Specially-designed or tuned operating systems
• What is Blue gene?
Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several supercomputers that are designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS = 1015) range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS (teraFLOPS = 1012).
It is a cooperative project among IBM(particularly IBM Rochester and the Thomas J. Watson Research Center), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy (which is partially funding the project), and academia.
• Why Blue Gene?
Blue Gene is an IBM Research project dedicated to exploring the
frontiers in supercomputing:
- in computer architecture,
- in the software required to program and control massively parallel systems, and
- in the use of computation to advance the understanding of important biological processes such as protein folding.
Learning more about biomolecular mechanisms is expected to give medical researchers better understanding of diseases, as well as potential cures.
• Why the name Blue gene?
“Blue” - The corporate color of IBM
“Gene” - The intended use of the Blue Gene clusters was for Computational biology.
• Blue Gene Projects
There are four Blue Gene projects in development:
- Blue Gene/L,
- Blue Gene/C,
- Blue Gene/P, and
- Blue Gene/Q.
• Blue Gene/L
The first computer in the Blue Gene series, is Blue Gene/L.
It is developed through a partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
The term Blue Gene/L sometimes refers to the computer installed at LLNL; and sometimes refers to the architecture of that computer.
As of November 2006, there are 27 computers on the Top500 list using the Blue Gene/L architecture.
• Blue Gene/L Super Computer
• History of Blue gene/L
In December 1999, IBM announced a $100 million research initiative for a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena.
The project has two main goals:
- to advance understanding of the biomolecular mechanisms via large-scale simulation, and
- to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software
• History of Blue gene/L
In November 2001, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory joined IBM as a research partner for Blue Gene.
Blue Gene/L is also the first supercomputer ever to run over 100 TFLOPS sustained on a real world application.
This achievement won the 2005 Gordon Bell Prize.
In November 2007, the LLNL Blue Gene/L remained at the number one spot as the world's fastest supercomputer.
• Blue Gene/L Architecture
Each compute node has two 700MHz PowerPC 440 embedded processors
Each of the dual processors on the compute node has two "floating point units (FPU)," engines for performing mathematical calculations.
The dual FPUs give each Blue Gene/L node a theoretical peak performance of 5.6GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS).
• Blue Gene/L Architecture
Compute nodes are packaged two per compute card, with 16 compute cards plus up to 2 I/O nodes per node board.
There are 32 node boards per cabinet/rack.
By integration of all essential sub-systems on a single chip, each Compute or I/O node dissipates low power (about 17 watts, including DRAMs).
• One Blue Gene/L nodeboard
• Blue Gene/C (Cyclops64)
Blue Gene/C (now renamed to Cyclops64) is a sister-project to Blue Gene/L.
It is a massively parallel, supercomputer-on-a-chip cellular architecture.
The Cyclops64 project aims to create the first "supercomputer on a chip".
• Blue Gene/C (Cyclops64)
Cyclops64 exposes much of the underlying hardware to the programmer, allowing the programmer to write very high performance, finely tuned software.
One negative consequence is that efficiently programming Cyclops64 is difficult.
The theoretical peak performance of a Cyclops64 chip is 80 gigaflops
• Blue Gene/P
On June 26, 2007, IBM unveiled Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the Blue Gene supercomputer.
Designed to run continuously at 1PFLOPS (petaFLOPS), it can be configured to reach speeds in excess of 3 PFLOPS.
It is at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer, accomplished by using many small, low-power chips connected through five specialized networks.
• Blue Gene/P Architecture
Four 850 MHz PowerPC 450 processors are integrated on each Blue Gene/P chip.
The 1-PFLOPS Blue Gene/P configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical network.
Blue Gene/P can be scaled to an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster to achieve 3-PFLOPS performance.
A standard Blue Gene/P configuration will house 4,096 processors per rack.
• Blue Gene/Q
The last known supercomputer design in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/Q is aimed to reach 20 Petaflops in the 2011 time frame.
It will continue to expand and enhance the Blue Gene/L and /P architectures with higher frequency at much improved performance per watt.
• Conclusion
President Obama recognized IBM and its Blue Gene family of supercomputers with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
The influence of the Blue Gene supercomputer's energy-efficient design and computing model can be seen today across the Information Technology industry.
Today, 18 of the top 20 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world are built on IBM high performance computing technology.
Blue Gene has some unusual features, but IBM has tried as much as possible to anchor the system to more mainstream technology.
Blue Gene would influence the way in which mainstream computers of the future are built.
Staying on the beaten path is the best way to take advantage of technology that's improving fastest, and it also makes it easier to create products out of the Blue Gene research.
