IBM has built the biggest ever dual-boot Windows/Linux HPC system for a consortium of Swedish research groups and universities.
The record-chasing firm will apparently unveil its 5,376 Intel Xeon quad-core processor blade system later on today. Computer World claims the system is able to reach an impressive 46 sustained teraflops on a beta version of Windows HPC Server 2008, with each chip apparently running at 2.5GHz and using 50 watts.
What makes the achievement particularly noteworthy is the fact that it is a relative rarity for an HPC system to be built on Windows rather than exclusively on Linux, which makes up around 85 percent of all HPC systems in the world.
Microsoft has long been interested in catching up with its rivals in the HPC field, and mow it looks like it might finally be making inroads.
The mega computer, which sits in the Umea University, about 680km north of Stockholm, is amongst the top 50 most powerful machines currently in existence.
In IBM’s labs, tiny rivers of water are cooling computer chips that have circuits and components stacked on top of each other, a design that promises to advance Moore’s Law in the next decade and significantly reduce energy consumed by data centers. IBM Researchers, in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, demonstrated a prototype that integrates the cooling system into the 3-D chips by piping water directly between each layer in the stack.
These so-called 3-D chip stacks – which take chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side-by-side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another — presents one of the most promising approaches to enhancing chip performance beyond its predicted limits.
This follows IBM’s leadership in advancing chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment a year ago, which shortens the distance information on a chip needs to travel by 1000 times, and allows for the addition of up to 100 times more channels, or pathways, for that information to flow compared to 2-D chips.
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AMD has announced growing industry support for the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor among global OEMs continues with IBM’s launch of three updated System x servers. Designed to address customer priorities such as energy efficiency, performance, scalability, and virtualization, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers from IBM offer an exceptional power-efficient platform for today’s most demanding datacenters.
“Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers deliver energy-efficiency even in the context of satisfying IBM’s most demanding high-performance computing solutions,” said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, AMD. “Datacenter managers are increasingly seeking a balance of performance, energy-efficiency, and advanced virtualization functionality in order to optimize server resources amidst skyrocketing power, cooling and space costs. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is at the forefront of addressing this new real-world definition of datacenter performance.”
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IBM has delivered the first of its new range of ‘Bluefire’ water-cooled supercomputers.
The Power 575 Hydro-Cluster will be installed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.
Water-cooled copper plates are placed on each of the supercomputer’s 4,064 Power6 processors, and IBM claims that the system is roughly 33 per cent more energy efficient than traditional air-cooling.
The Power 575 sports 12Tb of memory and 150TB of disk storage, and can process data at a peak speed of 76 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second).
The machine is expected to be one of the world’s 25 most powerful supercomputers, and the NCAR anticipates that the new system to triple its computing capacity.
Source & More Info: iTNews
