Sun supercomputer takes on IBM's Blue Gene

Sun is aiming to wrest the world supercomputing crown from IBM's Blue Gene courtesy of a US$59 million contract from the University of Texas for its Constellation design.

This is a 421 teraflop design, providing 421 million floating point operations per second, potentially reaching 2 petaflops. Unfortunately IBM has dimmed Sun's system with a 3 petaflop version of its Blue Gene supercomputer. Sun could potentially hit the number two spot.

Sun's Constellation

Constellation will be installed at TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, alongside other, lesser, supercomputers, and is a Linux cluster system, to be known as Ranger. It will have 3,288 nodes, starting out with 26,304 processing cores, using AMD's forthcoming Barcelona 4-core Opteron design, mounted on Sun blades. Ultimately there will be 1,302 Opterons providing 52,608 cores.

The initial memory will be 52.6TB with a final RAM capacity of 105TB. This will be backed up with 1.73PB of disk storage. The system components are connected by Infiniband with a huge, 3,456-port central switch designed by Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolstein. Its total bandwidth is 110TB/sec and it connects 1,152 cables with 12 connections per wire.

The benefit of a big switch is that inter-switch cables (needed if smaller switches were used) can be dispensed with, saving a lot of money as it's cheaper to build a big switch than link smaller switches. Six times fewer cables are needed in fact. Sun also says that the processors get a standard latency for data access this way.

It will need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack holds 768 cores.

Sun estimates that Constellation could scale to a 2 petaflop system with 1 exabyte of disk capacity - that's one million million million byes. It isn't enough to keep IBM at bay though.

The empire strikes back

IBM has announced Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the world's currently most powerful supercomputer. Also a Linux cluster, it nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L, while remaining, according to IBM, the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built.

It is designed to run continuously at speeds faster than 1 petaflop - 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second - and could be configured to reach 3 petaflops (one quadrillion means one thousand million million).

This is rather more powerful than a laptop computer and IBM helpfully suggests that a home user would need a 1.5 mile high pile of laptops to have 1 petaflop equivalent computing power available.

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