Tony, here's a bit more background on the machines from today's News.Com....
John
IBM builds fastest Blue yet
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 28, 1998, 12:40 p.m. PT
IBM and Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory have stepped into the supercomputer
lead with a machine that can perform almost 4
trillion calculations per second.
Vice President Al Gore boasted of the machine's
prowess at a news conference today, saying it's the
world's fastest computer, boasting a speed of 3.88
trillion computations per second, or about 15,000
times faster than the average desktop personal
computer.
The machine, called Blue
Pacific, is a mammoth
IBM RS/6000 SP
system with 1,464
"nodes," or individual
processing units, each
with four processors. A
total of 5,856
processors are ganged together with a proprietary
IBM interconnection hardware.
The RS/6000 is a long-standing proprietary
workstation and server line from IBM. The same
architecture is used in IBM's Deep Blue
chess-playing computer.
The supercomputer's primary mission is simulating
nuclear weapons explosions in an era when the real
thing is banned. But Gore pointed to other
possibilities the new computer will enable, including
advances in medicine, manufacturing, aviation, and
global climate change.
And IBM sees a wider market for the
supercomputers as well--not just in research areas
such as aerospace, pharmaceuticals, and
petroleum, but also in more traditional business
areas.
"We see high-performance computing as a growth
area for IBM," said Mike Henesey, who runs
IBM's scientific and technical computing program.
Businesses will be interested in using the computers
for numerically complicated analysis such as "data
mining" or optimizing a portfolio on Wall Street, he
said.
Smaller versions of the RS/6000 SP computers are
running at companies such as Schwab, which uses
a 100-node system a fourteenth the size of Blue
Pacific to handle its Web-based stock trading, said
Mike Borman, who's in charge of IBM's
worldwide RS/6000 sales. And United Airlines has
one for analyzing passenger traffic.
Blue Pacific is being assembled at the Lawrence
Livermore lab in Livermore, California. It achieved
the 3.88 "teraflops" (trillion floating point operations
per second) rating at IBM's RS/6000 headquarters
in Poughkeepsie, New York in September, said
Borman, but the machine has been used to run
actual Livermore code.
Nuclear weapons labs long have been one of the
biggest customers for the supercomputers, but
President Clinton's signing of the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty has increased the Energy
Department's appetite for big iron.
The new supercomputers are needed to run the
vastly more complex simulation programs that the
weapons labs use to certify that the nation's nuclear
weapons will work as advertised as they grow
older in the post-Cold War era. Earlier, computers
were used for simulating weapons physics, but only
using one- and two-dimensional simplifications. The
new supercomputers will have to handle simulations
in all three dimensions.
DOE is trying to increase supercomputer power
faster than it otherwise would develop by paying
companies to collaborate with the nation's three big
nuclear weapons labs.
IBM got a $93 million contract in 1996 to build
Blue Pacific with the Livermore lab, a machine
designed to reach a speed of 4 teraflops. Silicon
Graphics, a company with a huge presence in the
supercomputing area with its Cray Research
division, is working with Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico on another 4-teraflop
machine called Blue Mountain. And Intel already
has its 1-teraflop machine up and running at Sandia
National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New
Mexico.
More computers are on the way as part of DOE's
Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. Last
February, DOE announced that IBM won another
contract, this one for a 10-teraflop machine called
"Option White" at Livermore. Also on tap is a
30-teraflop machine slated for LANL, and
ultimately, at the end of the 10-year, billion-dollar
program, a 100-teraflop machine.
IBM isn't always the first company that comes to
mind when speaking of supercomputers. But the
company does have a significant presence on the
June 1998 version of the top 500 supercomputers
list. And IBM believes it has room to grow,
Henesey said.
IBM's Scalable Parallel (the "SP" in the RS/6000
product name) architecture can extend all the way
up to 1,000 teraflops--a petaflop, or quadrillion
floating point operations per second.
IBM has 5,000 RS/6000 SP systems deployed
worldwide, Henesey said.
This week, the Los Alamos lab--historically a
good-natured competitor with its Livermore
sister--fully assembled its computer, Blue
Mountain, said LANL spokesman Jim
Danneskiold. Blue Mountain, with 6,144
processors, has been running weapons code
rewritten for the massively parallel machine as the
machine was reaching its full size.
Using one sixth of its total computing power, Blue
Mountain was able to run a simulated nuclear
weapons test that analyzed physics interactions in
an area divided into 30 million zones, he said. A
similar simulation on the tried-and-true Cray Y-MP
supercomputer was only able to run the simulation
with 2.5 million zones.
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