IBM puts Blue Gene on tap

IBM is making its Blue Gene supercomputer, ranked the fastest in the world, available on demand so that high-performance computing customers can get the processing power they need when they need it without having to worry about high upfront costs or management headaches.

IBM has been offering supercomputing on demand for nearly two years, but on traditional hardware based on Xeon, Opteron and Power processors. Friday’s announcement marks the first time end users will have access to Blue Gene, a supercomputing system designed to provide extreme processing muscle at a fraction of the size and consuming a fraction of the power of similar high-end systems.

End users can tap into Blue Gene to run Linux-based workloads via a dedicated VPN into a new Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Center in Rochester, Minn. IBM develops and builds Blue Gene in Rochester, says David Gelardi, vice president of Deep Computing Capacity on Demand at IBM.

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IBM is making its Blue Gene supercomputer, ranked the fastest in the world, available on demand so that high-performance computing customers can get the processing power they need when they need it without having to worry about high upfront costs or management headaches.

IBM has been offering supercomputing on demand for nearly two years, but on traditional hardware based on Xeon, Opteron and Power processors. Friday’s announcement marks the first time end users will have access to Blue Gene, a supercomputing system designed to provide extreme processing muscle at a fraction of the size and consuming a fraction of the power of similar high-end systems.

End users can tap into Blue Gene to run Linux-based workloads via a dedicated VPN into a new Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Center in Rochester, Minn. IBM develops and builds Blue Gene in Rochester, says David Gelardi, vice president of Deep Computing Capacity on Demand at IBM.

“This is where the manufacturing and development of Blue Gene largely takes place, so we wanted to center the location of the physical resource with the best possible skills inside IBM. And then we’ll supplement them with application experts, who come from all over the company,” Gelardi says. “So we’re going to centralize the building of this new ecosystem for Blue Gene all around the Rochester facility.”

Blue Gene is unique, made up of specially designed Power-based nodes that include only a processor and a small amount of memory. The key feature of Blue Gene is that it is extremely dense: a single rack includes 1,024 dual-processor nodes that can reach peak performance of 5.7 teraflops.

The system is well suited for applications in the life sciences, such as genome research, the petroleum industry, for seismic analysis and reservoir modeling, and automotive and aerospace manufacturing for computer-aided engineering.

“We’re looking at some more traditional commercial things like risk analysis, so there might be some analytics and business intelligence applications,” says Gelardi, who adds that a single rack will be available at the Rochester facility initially, but that processors will be added over time as demands grow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., has been running a 32,000-processor Blue Gene system since December and is in the process of doubling its size.

In November, IBM made a commercial version of Blue Gene available for about $2 million to customers that want to bring the processing powerhouse into their data centers. By adding Blue Gene to its supercomputing-on-demand portfolio, IBM is giving users a more economical entryway into the system, Gelardi says.

“Customers can either buy a machine or they can buy capacity on demand, or both,” he says. “It depends on whether they want a little bit of Blue Gene all the time or a lot of Blue Gene some of the time.”

The nature of many applications that would be appropriate for Blue Gene - in life sciences, for example - go through periods of peaks and troughs, making an on-demand arrangement more cost-effective, Gelardi says.