IBM Super Marries Power6 With Nehalem

By Michael Feldman

August 14, 2008

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. IBM is planning to deliver one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, to help unravel the mysteries of the universe. Deja vu?

This latest IBM colossus will be a 360 teraflop machine that is headed for the University of Toronto and is to be shared by the SciNet Consortium, a group that includes the university and a number of research hospitals. Applications destined to run on the new super include the usual HPC suspects: aerospace, astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemical physics, and climate change prediction. The new machine will also be used by the CERN-run ATLAS project, which is investigating the forces that govern the universe.

From the IBM announcement, here are the main bragging points:

“[T]he machine is expected to be among the top 20 fastest supercomputers in the world; 30 times faster than the peak performance of Canada’s current largest research system. It also represents the second largest system ever built on a university campus, and the largest supercomputer outside the United States.”

The new system is slated to be fully operational next summer, although a partial implementation could be running as early as January. The acquisition is part of a five-year deal that is expected to cost $47 million.

One of the unconventional aspects of the system’s design is that it will incorporate both Power6- and Intel Nehalem-based clusters using IBM’s new iDataPlex platform. According to company sources, 300 teraflops will be Nehalem-based nodes and 60 teraflops will be Power6-based. This is yet another example of IBM’s increasing comfort with hybrid computing platforms. IBM’s more famous Roadrunner system combined AMD Opterons with Cell processors to deliver the world’s first petaflops computer. The idea behind hybrid computers is to give users the ability to run code on the most appropriate hardware in order to speed execution time.

Of course, the difficult part of hybrid computing is the software. Initially, individual applications will execute on one architecture or the other. Cluster Resources’ Moab cluster scheduler will be used to map jobs and will also include specific enhancements for a stateless, diskless multi-architecture cluster. The entire cluster is hooked to a storage system and uses GPFS as the backend file system. Both processor architectures will share these resources.

The plan is that over time, as software is optimized for the heterogeneous environment, it will be possible for applications to execute certain stages on the Nehalem portion and other stages on the Power6 portion. IBM says the entire cluster is modular and will support the changing of the OS and architecture dynamically.

The announcement of the Canadian super comes on the heels of IBM’s deal with the UK Met Office to deliver a 125 teraflop supercomputer for weather forecasting. That procurement represented a five-year contract that would have the Met Office system topping out at 1 petaflop by 2011. Unlike the Canadian machine, the UK system is pure Power6, as are the two 145 teraflops systems ordered by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the 125 teraflop system acquired by the Max Planck Society (MPG), a 76 teraflop system installed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the 60 teraflop machine running at SARA, in Amsterdam. That’s over 600 teraflops of Power6 deployed — or scheduled to be deployed — since the beginning of 2008. If you ignore the Roadrunner machine as an anomaly, Power6-based supercomputers acquisitions are outpacing the much more storied Cell-based supers.

In a way, that’s a little surprising. The sporty little 4.7 GHz Power6 chips tend to run hot and are among the least efficient processors in the increasingly important performance/watt metric. It’s no coincidence that the Power6-based clusters are all water cooled. So why is this architecture so successful? Maybe it’s because the IBM sales team could sell central heating in Singapore. Or maybe it’s because there’s a lot of Power-based software out there expecting great single-threaded performance and ready to hop on to the next processor generation. Whatever the reason, it will be interesting to see what the Power7 chips bring to the table. Hmm… I’ll bet they’ll be used to build one of the fastest computers in the world, to help unravel the mysteries of the universe.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire