PERCS

PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System), officially known as the Power 775, is IBM's answer to DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) initiative.

IBM officially announced the Power 775 on July 12, 2011 and started to ship systems in August 2011.^[1]

Background

The HPCS program is a three-year research and development effort. IBM was one of three companies, along with Cray and Sun Microsystems, that received the HPCS grant for Phase II. In this phase, IBM collaborated with a consortium of 12 universities and the Los Alamos National Lab to pursue an adaptable computing system with the goal of commercial viability of new chip technology, new computer architecture, operating systems, compiler and programming environments.^[2]

IBM was chosen for Phase III in November 2006, and granted $244 million in funds for continuing development of PERCS technology and delivering prototype systems by 2010.^[3]

Deployment

The first supercomputer using PERCS technology was intended to be the Blue Waters system, however the high costs and complexity of the system resulted in its contract being cancelled.^[4]^[5]

Technology

PERCS will use IBM's large scale technologies from servers and supercomputers like the POWER7 microprocessor, AIX operating system, X10 programming language and General Parallel File System.

Power 775

Densely packaging up to 3,072 POWER7 processor cores per rack, each one running at 3.83 GHz, the 256-core Power 775 supercomputing drawer is designed for speed and tuned for performance. With the capability of clustering up to 2,048 drawers together, the total processing power of up to 524,288 POWER7 cores can be assigned to tackle some of the world's greatest problems. Supported by up to 24 TBs of memory and 230 TBs of storage per rack and super fast interconnects, the Power 775 is estimated to achieve over 96 TFLOPS per rack. The radical new approach to HPC represented by the Power 775 system marks another step in the evolution of modular clusters designed to solve the world's greatest problems. Starting with the lightning fast POWER7 processors, adding the ultra dense packaging of 256 cores in a 2U drawer and chilled with new water cooling technology to enable peak performance, this system is a supersonic race car on the IT highway.^[6]

References

External links

[1] ttp://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/8/897/ENUS111-058/index.html

[2] ttp://www.hpcwire.com/features/17883339.html

[3] ttp://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=3ZYLXC1ZK5OPMQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=195800001

[4] ttp://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/Petascale_Project_Blue_Waters_Gets_Green_Light.html

[5] ttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/08/ibm_kills_blue_waters_super/

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