Blue Gene Watson

A BlueGene / L cabinet, which is also used for Blue Gene Watson.

Blue Gene Watson ( BGW ) is a supercomputer from IBM , located in the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York , is located. Blue Gene Watson was the second fastest computer on the TOP500 list in the first LINPACK measurement in June 2005 . Its power is 91.29 teraflops . The maximum computing power of the supercomputer is around 114 teraflops (peak).

Structure and operation

Blue Gene Watson consists of 20 racks, the hardware of which is the same as that of the BlueGene / L. Each of these racks contains 1024 nodes. Each node consists of two 700 MHz Power 440 processors and 512 MB working memory (RAM). The complete 20 racks are divided into five rows with four racks each.

Users interact with BGW by his four front-end nodes, each of which is a IBM p655 server is that with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is running. 9

Each of these racks has 16 I / O nodes that are used for data input and output. The I / O nodes communicate via an internal Gigabit Ethernet connection. The primary data storage consists of 60 terabytes of SAN-based hard drives that use the General Parallel File System . In addition, a 500 terabyte IBM 3494 tape library is used to back up the data from the hard disk.

Workspace

The primary task of the Blue Gene Watson is to calculate and evaluate scientific calculations that do not show the desired results on weaker computers. The system runs non-stop, performing scientific calculations 90% of the time (divided into 40% protein folding, 40% other biological simulations, 20% other scientific calculations), the remaining 10% is used for “advanced computer research” . In an early development phase of the software, also called Watson , for answering questions asked in natural language, there were attempts to operate this also on the Blue Gene architecture. Ultimately, however, the developers opted for the Power 750 server system, which is equipped with more powerful processors.

Web links

Description of the supercomputer of IBM (English)
BGW at TOP500 (English)

Individual evidence

↑ TOP500 Ranking History ( Memento of the original from December 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2
↑ “How Watson works.” Interview Amara D. Angelicas with Eric Brown (IBM) from January 31, 2011, accessed on February 16, 2011.

[1] TOP500 Ranking History ( Memento of the original from December 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2

[2] “How Watson works.” Interview Amara D. Angelicas with Eric Brown (IBM) from January 31, 2011, accessed on February 16, 2011.