IBM reclaims supercomputer crown for U.S.

IDG News Service - For the first time since 2002, Japan's Earth Simulator isn't the most powerful supercomputer on the planet.
IBM has assembled a 16,000-processor version of its BlueGene/L supercomputer, which on Sept. 16 edged out the Earth Simulator, built by IBM rival NEC Corp., according to benchmarks run by IBM.
"This is a kind of seminal announcement for us," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. "[Earth Simulator's] reign as the most powerful supercomputer in the world has come to an end."
Running the Linpack benchmark, which is used to evaluate supercomputing power for the biannual Top500 list of supercomputers, BlueGene was able to achieve a sustained performance of 36.01 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS). On the June Top500 list, Earth Simulator was benchmarked at 35.86 TFLOPS.
Assembled at IBM facilities in Rochester, Minn., the BlueGene system is an eight-rack prototype of the $100 million system IBM plans to deliver to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory early next year. The Lawrence Livermore supercomputer, however, will be a 64-rack, 130,000-processor system that will dwarf the Rochester system with an estimated peak performance of 360 TFLOPS, according to Turek.
Its long reign as maker of the world's most powerful supercomputer has been a point of pride for Japan's NEC, which was effectively shut out of the U.S. market at one point by a 454% duty on its machines.
Built in 2002 to model climate change simulations for the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the Earth Simulator took five years to construct and cost $450 million. It consists of 5,120 processors housed in 64 cabinets in the center of a 162-by-208-foot room.
The eight-rack BlueGene system will take up only about 320 square feet and consumes 216 kilowatts, a fraction of the 6,000 kilowatts required by the Earth Simulator, Turek said.
IBM's benchmark results are big news for the U.S. as well as IBM, said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director of computing sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a maintainer of the Top500 list. "Winning back the No. 1 spot by a U.S. vendor with U.S. technology and for a U.S. site is an important change politically," he said in an e-mail interview.
IBM intends to produce a number of systems using BlueGene components, Turek said, including systems for Argonne National Laboratory, the Dutch astronomy organization ASTRON, and the Computational Biology Research Center of Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
Whether or not BlueGene will be No. 1 on the next Top500 ranking in November remainsto be seen, however.
IBM is working with customers on a number of systems that could potentially perform at about 40 TFLOPS, Turek said. "There are activities in our part that would get us in that range, and I can only assume that our competitors are doing the same," he said.
NASA Ames's Project Columbia, a 10,240-processor supercomputer being built by Silicon Graphics Inc., could very well be such a contender, Simon said.