IBM Drops 10 PFlop NCSA Supercomputer Project
IBM's ambitious Blue Waters supercomputer project apparently drowned in complex technology and a flood of unexpected costs.
IBM, which was contracted by National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, is said to have abandoned the project as the "technology […] was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations."
A press release indicated that the two parties could not find a mutual plan that would accommodate the changed environment. As a result, the NCSA is getting its money back. IBM will also get back all equipment that had been already delivered.
Blue Waters was originally planned to become NCSA's new flagship supercomputer with a peak performance of 10 PFlops that should have been delivered by at least 300,000 IBM Power7 cores. The original core architecture promised a quad-CPU module, which holds four 8-core Power7 processors. Each processor was promised to deliver a peak performance of 256 GFlops and each module about 1 TFlops. Other specs included more than 1 PB of memory, more than 25 PB of storage, 500 PB of archival storage and more than 100 Gbps of bandwidth. The NCSA said that it has not abandoned the project, but is looking for other ways to realize its next supercomputer.
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bunch of losers
What did the NSCA plan to do with the supercomputer?
Make your life easier through research.
If I repeated the last paragraph to someone, I would sound smart
Aperture science. We do what we must, because we can...
What did the NSCA plan to do with the supercomputer?
I would suspect simulations and problem solving algorithms that would take days, if not weeks on ordinary computers. One of my electronic engineering teachers told us he did his thesis would've taken weeks to do in an ordinary computer, and he did it in 2 hours on his university's supercomputer.
They should contact NVidia for the computer.
And neverdyne is correct, things like Meteorological models would be calculated on this. A lot of math problems take forever to do out, even with a modern desktop computer, so they build supercomputers to grind the numbers.
Would it be able to run Crysis 2?
What did the NSCA plan to do with the supercomputer?
Find cures for male pattern baldness and erectile dysfunction.
good job robots!
Make your life easier through research.
You know, checking emails, updating their Facebook status, messing up wikipedia entries.
A sensible alternative would be the next-gen SGI Altix UV, or the ICE
if a shared-memory model isn't needed.
Ian.
I would suspect simulations and problem solving algorithms that would take days, if not weeks on ordinary computers. One of my electronic engineering teachers told us he did his thesis would've taken weeks to do in an ordinary computer, and he did it in 2 hours on his university's supercomputer.
Maybe simulations that would take years on normal computers. I myself I use more than 100 000 hours (about 10 years) of cpu time per year for a rather small project.
Bad blow for IBM. Whoever ends up finishing the project will have a lot of bragging rights, having done what IBM chickened out of.
Bad blow for IBM. Whoever ends up finishing the project will have a lot of bragging rights, having done what IBM chickened out of.
I doubt it was chickening out. Sounds more like the NSCA didn't want to pay what it was worth, and IBM told them to bugger off.
The deal was probably broke when IBM tried to patent everything.
IBM backed out when they discovered that U of I intended to build the world's largest porn server. Big Blue didn't want its storied and respected brand sullied by such base schemes masquerading as noble scientific inquiry.
They realised ....Blue Waters is really the predecessor to Skynet. So they are TERMINATING it in advance....but rest assure, blue water WILL BE BACK again in THE RISE OF THE MACHINES....
What did the NSCA plan to do with the supercomputer?
Same thing we do every night Pinky, "Try to take over the world!". SFX=Evil laugh.
I herd crysis kept crashing on it and NSCA got pissed.
I doubt it was chickening out. Sounds more like the NSCA didn't want to pay what it was worth, and IBM told them to bugger off.
If NCSA wants to pay less and ends up doing so to another supercomputer builder, it shows IBM couldn't deliver the technology at the same competitive cost. Either way, technological- or business-wise, IBM couldn't or didn't want to pull it off.
Impressive...
What did the NSCA plan to do with the supercomputer?
Break AES-256 encryption??
If terrorist are using AES-256 someone needs to break it right?
JohnnyLucky wrote:
> What did the NSCA plan to do with the supercomputer?
Typical application areas are as follows (these refs are on SGI's site, but the
target customers apply to all HPC vendors):
http://www.sgi.com/solutions/research/
http://www.sgi.com/solutions/government/
http://www.sgi.com/solutions/energy/
Note that codes which can exploit more than 500 CPUs/cores are hard to write.
A lot of work is going on to extend parallelism in various fields to support
the execution of larger models. Cosmology inparticular is a strong research
area for this.
Ian.
That should have no problem playing Crysis while cooking breakfast and coffee for an entire army.
That joke just reads kinda lame now.
And actually no, such systems normally don't have gfx cards. SGI's old high-end
systems had expensive gfx modules as an option, but then that was their speciality.
Ian.