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Some more interesting stuff ....on the computer:

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IBM's BlueGene/Q super chip grows 18th core

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By Timothy Prickett Morgan

22nd August 2011 17:00 GMT

It's nice to have a spare

Hot Chips The mystery surrounding the number of cores in the 64-bit Power processor that will be at the heart of the 20 petaflops "Sequoia" BlueGene/Q supercomputer has been finally cleared up.

Back at the SC10 supercomputing conference in November 2010, a software engineer working on the BlueGene/Q system told El Reg that the processor module at the heart of the system would have 17 cores: one to run the Linux kernel and the 16 others to perform mathematical calculations. IBM also said at the time that this chip would be a variant of the PowerA2 "wirespeed" processor, but geared down to 1.6GHz from its 2.3GHz design speed.

In February 2011, when Argonne National Laboratory said that it was going to take a 10 petaflop super based on the BlueGene/Q design (basically half of the Sequoia machine that is going into Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), IBM told El Reg that it was just a 16-core chip, nothing funky.

For whatever reason, neither turns out to be true. The BlueGene/Q processor, the company revealed at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University late last week, actually has 18 cores: 16 cores for doing work, one core for running Linux services, and a spare that is intended to merely increase the yield that IBM Microelectronics can get out of its chip fabs but which can, according to George Chiu, senior manager of advanced high performance systems at IBM, be activated and used in the system, in theory.

Chiu was very clear, however, that he was not making any promises that this 18th core would be used as a hot spare in any BlueGene/Q supers, but merely that the capability is there.

Big Blue detail

IBM gave out a lot more detail on the BlueGene/Q processor at Hot Chips, and Chiu walked El Reg through the details. The chip looks like this:

The BlueGene/Q custom Power processor

Like other processor designs these days, the BlueGene/Q processor is an example of a system-on-a-chip design, which tries to cram as many components of the system board onto the chip. The BlueGeneQ processor is based on the Power A2 core that IBM created for networking devices and experimentation, and this is the block diagram of the core:

B>IBM unveils BlueGene/Q at SC11

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IBM unveils BlueGene/Q at SC11

Donald B Johnston, LLNL, (925) 423-4902, johnston19@llnl.gov

Kim Cupps, leader of the high performance computing division, talks to reporters following the unveiling of Blue Gene/Q (the cabinet to her left) at SC11 in Seattle.
Photo credit: Wayne Butman/LLNL

The BlueGene/Q supercomputing system that will be deployed at the Lab as Sequoia was officially unveiled by IBM in a brief ceremony at the start of SC11, the annual supercomputing conference. Kim Cupps, leader of the High Performance Computing (HPC) division, representing the Laboratory, paid tribute to the longstanding partnership with IBM and the computing breakthroughs that have resulted.

"We're looking forward to running codes on the 20-petaflop Sequoia system in 2012," Cupps said. "We expect to achieve many exciting results in areas of national importance including: uncertainty quantification, materials modeling, energy modeling, laser plasma interaction and climate change. "This machine is an amazing achievement. We began our partnership with IBM more than 15 years ago with a goal of achieving 100 peak TeraFLOPs in 10 years," she said. "We achieved our goal twice in 2005: with the 360-teraflop BlueGene/L machine and the 100-teraflop Purple machine."

Cupps noted that just six years later "we are standing in front of a machine on a per rack basis that is 36 times more powerful than BlueGene/L and 10 times more energy efficient."

Jim Herring, IBM director of HPC Offerings, kicked off the event in IBM's SC11 booth before a group of reporters. Rick Stevens, deputy associate director at Argonne National Laboratory, also spoke. For the second time this year, BlueGene/Q was ranked No. 1 on the Green 500 list of the world's most energy efficient computers. Energy efficiency remains one of the greatest challenges for next-generation exascale supercomputers.

"Energy efficiency was a critical factor in selecting this machine and will continue to be of paramount importance as we move toward more powerful machines in the future," Cupps said. The BlueGene/Q Sequoia system is scheduled for delivery to LLNL for NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing program starting in December with deployment in 2012. When completed, Sequoia is expected to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

The ranking of the top 10 supercomputers on the industry-standard Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers remained unchanged, though several systems showed performance improvements. The new list was released at SC11 Tuesday. Japan's "K" computer is the world's fastest supercomputer, clocking 10 petaFLOP/S (quadrillion floating operations per second). See the Top500 Website for a complete list.

Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides solutions to our nation's most important national security challenges through innovative science, engineering and technology. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.