BLUE GENE von IBM

Zitat

IBM
IBM is already working for some years on its Blue Gene system. The first of these systems, the Blue Gene/L is likely to appear somewhere in 2004. The system will come with 65,536 processors at a 700 MHz clock frequency and two floating-point units/processor. As each floating-point unit should be able to do a fuse multiply-add (as in the current POWER4), the system should have a Theoretical Peak Performance of 183.5 Tflop/s. Other Blue Gene follow-ups are planned called the Blue Gene/P with a peak speed of 1 Pflop/s, and the Blue Gene/Q with a peak speed of 3 Pflop/s, respectively. All these systems are hardly meant for the average HPC user but they may help in finding suitable architectural features for systems for the general market.

Of course the development of the POWER4 processors also will make its mark: the POWER5 processor will have the usual technology-related advantages over its predecessor, but also it is considered how to configure them such that by coupling eight of them a virtual vector processor with a peak speed of 60--80 Gflop/s can be made. This approach is called the ViVA (Virtual Vector Architecture). It is reminiscent of the Hitachi's SR8000 processors or the MSP processors in the Cray X1. This road will take some years to go even after the POWER5 processor itself will become available in 2004/2005.