IBM will release a radical new chip which may become the world¡¯s fastest supercomputer named Blue Waters. It will be able to do massively complex calculations in an instant and it is being housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus in a water-cooled rack to pull the heat out. It¡¯ll be capable of achieving 10 petaflops (Petaflop is the key indicator of supercomputer performance, A petaflop = 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second) about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today. IBM is going to turn on the supercomputer in 2011.
The Supercomputer uses Power7 fuses, the flagship Power chip design with key technology from a separate ¡°Cell¡± processor that was part of IBM¡¯s Roadrunner system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It integrates eight processing cores in one chip package and each core can execute four tasks makes the Power7 chip special. These threads can turn an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor. As a yardstick, Intel¡¯s high-end Xeon processors typically have two threads per processing core. It is also using novel memory technology. In this super computer IBM has avoided ballooning and costly chip counts and elected to use a technology called E-DRAM, keeping the total number of transistors to 1.2 billion. IBM said E-DRAM will help to get the performance up of the computer. Most of the crash tests are now done on these machines. Now it¡¯s ready to unveil.
The project is a joint affair of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, its National Center for Supercomputing Applications, IBM, and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, which includes Iowa State. The NSF is offering $208 Million to the Blue Waters project for the next four and a half years.
The Blue Waters will be equipped with -
1.More than 1 Petabyte main memory.
2.10 Petabyte Disk Storage.
3.Half an exabyte archival storage.
4.400 Gbit/s external connectivity.
Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois.
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