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
Formerly known as the POWER7 IH, the Power 775 is a water cooled rack module, 30 inches wide, 6 feet deep and 3.5 inches (2u) high. Each drawer comprise up to eight nodes (single O/S image) with a MCM with four POWER7 CPUs each, and 16 DDR3 SDRAM slots per MCM for a total of 256 POWER7 cores and 2 TB RAM. Each drawer also has eight optical connect controller chips, connecting neighboring MCMs, PCIe peripherals and other compute nodes. One rack can house up to a dozen Power 775 drawers for a total performance of 96 TFLOPS.[6]
See also
References
- ^ http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/8/897/ENUS111-058/index.html
- ^ http://www.hpcwire.com/features/17883339.html
- ^ http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=3ZYLXC1ZK5OPMQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=195800001
- ^ http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/Petascale_Project_Blue_Waters_Gets_Green_Light.html
- ^ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/08/ibm_kills_blue_waters_super/
- ^ IBM 'Blue Waters' super node washes ashore in August