IBM dominates supercomputing list

Blue Gene moving up
The Blue Gene/L machines -- three of which have been sold so far -- are an unusual design based on a variation of IBM's Power family of processors. Each chip has dual processors, and each processor has built-in circuitry to communicate with five separate networks. That means the systems don't need a separate, expensive switch to link all the processors, and that doubling the number of processors comes close to doubling the overall performance, said Bill Pulleyblank, a director of IBM's Deep Computing group.

Here are the 10 most powerful supercomputers, as of June 2004:

• 1: NEC's Earth Simulator
• 2: California Digital's Thunder at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• 3: Hewlett-Packard's ASCI Q at Los Alamos National Laboratory
• 4: IBM's Blue Gene/L DD1 prototype at the Thomas Watson Research Centre
• 5: Dell's Tungsten at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications
• 6: Two IBM Power4-based clusters at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' High Performance Computing Facility
• 7: Fujitsu's Super Combined Cluster at the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, also known as Riken
• 8: IBM's Blue Gene/L DD2 prototype at the Thomas Watson Research Centre
• 9: HP's Itanium-based cluster at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• 10: Dawning's 4000A at Shanghai Supercomputer Centre

IBM built two prototypes, the No. 4 ranked system, with 8,192 500MHz processors and a speed of 13.8 teraflops, and the No. 8 ranked machine, with 4,096 700MHz processors and a speed of 8.7 teraflops. The 700MHz chips will be used in a Blue Gene/L, the construction of which will start this fall at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

There's a "good chance" the Livermore system will top the Top500 this November, said Dave Turek, leader of the Deep Computing team. He scoffs at governmental fretting that the United States is losing dominance to the Japanese because of Earth Simulator.

"The trajectory of it is already clear. Those parties who might be wringing their hands about the supremacy of the Japanese ought to be wringing their hands about something else," Turek said.

One of the reasons is compactness. The top-ranked Blue Gene/L is about the size of eight refrigerators. The Earth Simulator, though three times faster, occupies a room 71 yards long and 55 yards wide.

IBM eventually plans to make a product out of Blue Gene/L -- but not yet. "When does Blue Gene make the transition from our characterisation as a research project to a more mainstream product? We're not ready to make that declaration yet," Turek said. "Pretty soon we'll be able to declare our intent here."

IBM also is working on another design, Blue Gene/C. Pulleyblank acknowledges that its chips have many more processors on each slice of silicon, but otherwise remains mum.