HPCwire: IBM Unlocks the Cell

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

September 15, 2006

IBM Unlocks the Cell

Page: 1 of 6
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 All »

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.

Page: 1 of 6
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html