More Details Of IBM's Blue Gene/L


Bob Plankers writes "By now we've all heard about IBM's Blue Gene/L, LLNL's 
remarkable new supercomputer which is intended to be the fastest supercomputer 
on Earth when done (360 TeraFLOPS). IBM has released some new photos of the 
prototype, and renditions of the final cluster. Note that the racks are angled 
in order to permit hot air to escape vertically and reduce the need for powered 
cooling. The machine uses custom CPUs with dual PowerPC 440 processing cores, 
four FPUs (two per core), five network controllers, 4 MB of DRAM, and a memory 
controller onboard. The prototype has 512 CPUs running at 700 MHz, and when 
finished the entire machine will have 65536 dual-core CPUs running at 1 GHz or 
more. Stephen Shankland's ZDnet article also mentions that the system runs 
Linux, but not on everything: 'Linux actually resides on only a comparatively 
small number of processors; the bulk of the chips run a stripped-down operating 
system that lets it carry out the instructions of the Linux nodes.'" 
