IBM to build fastest supercomputers yet

IBM has won a $290m government contract to build what are expected to be the world's two fastest supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, the company plans to announce today.

One machine, ASCI Purple for nuclear weapons research, will be three times faster than the world's current top-ranked supercomputer, NEC's Earth Simulator, which has been clocked at 35 trillion calculations per second, or "teraflops." The other machine, the Linux-powered Blue Gene/L for civilian research, will be 10 times faster than Earth Simulator with a speed of 360 teraflops, according to IBM.

Also included in the $290m government contract is a third, smaller computer - a comparatively ordinary cluster of 944 x335servers and 32 x345 machines.

The deal, scheduled for announcement at the SC2002 supercomputer show in Baltimore, reflects the progress IBM has made in the supercomputer market, beyond its stronghold of mainframes and other business-oriented computers that handle tasks such as logging inventory and sales transactions.

In 1993, IBM got its first systems onto the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. Today, the list includes 134 IBM machines with a combined computing power larger than that of any other company in the rankings.

The design details of Blue Gene/L still haven't been settled beyond a plan for it to have 65,636 computing nodes, said Peter Ungaro, IBM vice president of high-performance computing. The design for ASCI Purple, though, is better established, and brute force figures prominently in it.

ASCI Purple, due to be running by the end of 2004, is expected to have 196 interconnected 64-processor servers, making a total of 12,544 Power5 chips. It will come with 50 terabytes of memory - about 20,000 times as much as a PC. The supercomputer also will have IBM disk storage arrays holding 2 petabytes, or a quadrillion bytes, of data - about 50,000 times the capacity of a PC.

As for physical size, ASCI Purple will weigh about 197 tons, be linked to 119 miles of optical cable and 28 miles of copper cable, and occupy 8,900 square feet of floor space - or about two basketball courts. It will consume 4.7 megawatts of power, enough current for 4,000 homes, according to IBM.

For enormous systems with thousands of processors, a major challenge will be simply keeping all the components up and running and circumventing problem areas when they occur. IBM is working on autonomic computing technology, or machines that can diagnose and repair problems themselves, "so we can make systems of this size more self-maintaining," IBM's Ungaro said. "If there are failures, they can be routed around so the machine is still available to users."

Stephen Shankland writes for News.com