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September 15, 2006
IBM Unlocks the Cell
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Last week, the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration selected IBM to design and build the world's first supercomputer that will use both Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) processors and conventional AMD Opteron processors. The petaflop machine, code-named Roadrunner, is scheduled to be deployed at Los Alamos National Laboratory sometime in 2008. This not only represents IBM's first supercomputer containing Cell processors, but it also signifies the company's first large-scale heterogenous system deployment.
HPCwire got the opportunity to talk with David Turek, vice president of Deep Computing at IBM, about the new system. In this extended interview, Turek reveals IBM's strategy behind the Roadrunner platform and how it fits into the company's supercomputing plans. He also discusses IBM's overall approach to hardware accelerators and heterogeneous computing.
HPCwire: What is the significance of the Roadrunner deployment? Is it a one-off system or does it represent the start of a new line of IBM supercomputers?
Turek: The significance of Roadrunner is that this is our preferred architectural design for the deployment of Cell in the HPC application arena. To be clear, we have no plans to build a giant cluster just out of Cell processors. Instead we think the Roadrunner model is the correct model which employs Cell as an accelerator to a conventional microprocessor-based server.
Over the course of time, we expect accelerators to become a key element to our overarching strategy. So the work that we do here is designed, in particular, to be sufficiently general to encompass a variety of models on how accelerators might be deployed.
Our intention with respect of a more broadly propagated version of Roadrunner is an assignment we've given ourselves for the fall to see exactly how far this can be extended and how deeply it can be played in the marketplace. We've got to resolve programming model issues. Secondly, the early Cell deployment is based on single precision floating point; that's going to go to double precision [for the final deployment]. So there's work to be done here to see exactly how this plays out.
In a sense this is no different than our launch of Blue Gene, which nominally was targeted to a very narrow set of applications, but which over the course of time demonstrated much broader utility. And if you go back still further in time, when we launched the SP system back in the 90s, we viewed that as a more niche product; and that too became more broadly deployed.
So this is an addition to our portfolio. It is not meant to displace or replace anything. We just think that the diversity of application types are such that there will be a need for a broader portfolio rather than a narrower portfolio.
HPCwire: Are you looking at other accelerator devices besides Cell?
Turek: Always. Our technology outlook is pretty broad. We're looking at trends several years in the future. So we've been looking at a variety of schemes for acceleration, and it goes beyond just looking at the conventional idea of using an FPGA for an accelerator -- which, by the way, we don't think is a good idea. And it goes as far as us beginning to think about system level acceleration as it applies to workflow, as opposed to process level acceleration as it applies to specific applications.
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