* DOE supercomputer features Linux and thousands of gaming console chips
The Department of Energy’s next great supercomputer will be made by the inventor of the supercomputer, will run partly on chips designed for video games and the operating system, of course, will be Linux.
IBM recently announced a deal with the Energy Department to deliver a one-petaflop (or 1,000 trillion calculations per second) supercomputer based on the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell B.E.) chip – the same processor that will be used in Sony’s PlayStation 3 game system.
The supercomputer will also run x86 processors from AMD to form what IBM calls a “hybrid” supercomputer. The system will be installed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M., and will occupy the space “of three basketball courts,” according to IBM. Named “Roadrunner,” the monster machine will consist of 16,000 AMD processors housed in IBM System x servers, and 16,000 Cell B.E. chips running in IBM BladeCenter H chassis. Linux will be the underlying operating system for each processor.
Control software written specifically for the supercomputer will coordinate the jobs distributed to the AMD and Cell B.E. processors. For example, complex and repetitive number crunching involved in mathematical equations would be broken up and spread out over the Cell B.E. processors, while less complex tasks such as data communications and file I/O will be handled by the AMD chips.
IBM expects to have Roadrunner installed and running by 2008.
* For more about the chip inside Sony’s game console and its application in the scientific world, read Deni Connor’s Servers Newsletter “Scientists adapt gaming processor for high-performance computing”.
