Year 1951
Year 2006
IBM BlueGene/L: The World's Most Powerful Supercomputer.
BlueGene/L recently achieved a sustained world-record speed of 280.6 teraOPS on the Linpack benchmark at Lawrence Livermore, hinting at the machine’s huge potential for rapid "time to solution" for applications in molecular dynamics and materials science.
Each BlueGene/L node consists of a single compute ASIC (an application-specific integrated circuit) and SDRAM-DDR memory chips. The compute ASIC is a complete system-on-a-chip, including all network interfaces and a modest amount of fast on-chip memory. An on-chip memory controller provides for access to larger external memory chips.
The nodes are interconnected through multiple complementary high-speed low-latency networks, including a 3D torus network and a combining tree network. The physical machine architecture is targeted to be most closely tied to the 3D torus, a simple 3-dimensional nearest neighbor interconnect which is "wrapped" at the edges. An independent combining tree network provides for fast global operations, such as global max or global sum.
The ASIC that comprises the nodes is based on IBM's system-on-a-chip technology giving a very compact, low-power building block. This is used to create an extremely high compute-density system with very attractive cost performance and relatively modest power and cooling requirements.
BlueGene/L boasts a peak speed of over 360 teraOPS, a total memory of 32 tebibytes, total power of 1.5 megawatts, and machine floor space of 2,500 square feet. The full system has 65,536 dual-processor compute nodes. Multiple communications networks enable extreme application scaling:
BlueGene/L is scaled up with a few unique components and IBM’s system-on-a-chip technology developed for the embedded marketplace.
IBM, 25 years of personal computing - Year 1981-2006
APPLE, 30 years of personal computing - Year 1976-2006
