Russia Buys the Supercomputer BlueGene/P from IBM
On January 23 2008, Moscow state University and Hardware Vendor IBM signed an agreement to deploy its Supercomputer IBM BlueGene/P in Department of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics for research in nanotechnology and life sciences.
As Russia’s leading academic institution, we are very proud that Moscow State University should join the ranks of the world’s leading research organizations to tackle some of the most complex and computer intensive problems known to man-kind – from astrophysics, to molecular modeling
Said Viktor Sadovnichiy, Rector of Moscow State University.
This agreement with IBM heralds a new era of supercomputing in Russia
Prior of BlueGene/P, Russia already have some Supercomputers but this is a unique approach because BlueGene is totally a different generation of Supercomputers and unlike its other competitors, compute with less power and energy consumption than others.
They ordered two racks of the Blue Gene/P, each have a size of a fridge {not the Google fridge but the one you have in your house} powered by 8.192 processors .The combined computing power will be capable of executing 27.8 trillion operations per second (Teraflops) which is 2,600+ times faster than today’s fastest desktop PC.
Mr. Kirill Korniliev, Country General Manager, IBM East Europe & Asia Said:
IBM is working with top universities and government agencies around the world to deliver the next generation of supercomputers that combine different types of processors to increase compute power while reduce energy and space costs
He further said that:
Our agreement with Moscow State University demonstrates not only our commitment to Russia’s leading university, but to Russia’s national scientific agenda.
No Doubt that BlueGene series is leading the Supercomputers with its compact, low-cost and energy efficient design.
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January 28th, 2008 at 12:00 am
Sounds awesome, but…
Isn’t the PS3 (the 7-SPE Cell processor) capable of achieving almost a TFLOP by itself? Even though that is only with single-floating-point numbers, that is much cheaper… what would the difference be between this BlueGene supercomputer and a mere 30 or so PS3s? Not to mention if you added a powerful cooling system and overclocked them. In fact, I heard that the most powerful supercomputing cluster in history was in fact a collection of PS3s combined over the internet to achieve over 1 PFLOP, albeit with a extremely slow “system bus” (the internet).
January 28th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Yeah. I’m not sure the version of Blue Gene that the University ordered has it, but IBM plans to start making the Blue Gene with the Cell Brodband engine (with all 8 SPEs, the PS3 has one disabled)
the collection of PS3’s your thinking of is Stanford Universities Folding@Home application. and yes it is over 1PFLOP. (hundreds of thousands of PS3s have signed up. something like 33000 active PS3s. I have my PS3 running the program right now)
and if you wanted to you can buy a cluster of PS3’s, you can get them from Terra Soft (with Yellow dog linux installed) for $17500(8node) or $42000 (32node).
With the supercomputer you would get more ram, and many more processors. Like it says up there, the blue gene has over 8000 processors. and to reach 1PFLOP you would need over near 30k processors.
January 28th, 2008 at 12:39 am
Quote:
Off by a bit…should be near 300k processors
January 28th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Should be some new munitions coming out of Moscow soon.
February 8th, 2008 at 5:46 am
Awesome, Do you think it could handle Crysis?
xD
February 8th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
do you think it has a back-door?
February 20th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
lol or more appropriately, how many back-doors does it have?
May 8th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Yes it is Good Thing atlast Russia is recognized in Super Computing as an intelligent Computing Nation