IBM Open Sources Supercomputer Code

eldavojohn writes "IBM has announced at the LinuxWorld conference that they are now hosting all their supercomputing stack software as open source from the University of Illinois. From the article: 'The software will initially support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and IBM Power6 processors. IBM is planning to add support for Power 575 supercomputing servers and IBM x86 platforms such as System x 3450 servers, BladeCenter servers and System x iDataPlex servers. The stack includes several distinct software tools that have been tested and integrated by IBM. These include the Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit (xCAT), originally developed for large clusters based on Intel's commodity x86 architecture but now modified for clusters based on IBM's own Power architecture. xCAT is used in the National Nuclear Security Administration's Roadrunner Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico — a hybrid cluster currently ranked by the official Top 500 list as the world's most powerful supercomputer.' For several years, Linux has been a strong tool for supercomputing."

Re:Sweet

[VoyagerRadio]

Seriously, though: would the Power6 have been the successor to the chip family we call Apple's G5? (You know, if Apple had continued using PowerPC chips?) I'm researching this using Wikipedia but haven't yet discovered the answer...any Slashheads know?

Re:Sweet

[pleappleappleap]

IBM's later chips have AltiVec, even though they have nothing to do with Apple anymore.

Cluster administration software should only be FS

[shlompo]

I used to be in charge of administrating the lab cluster at the MOSIX project (http://www.mosix.org). The tools we used back then, where series of scripts, that performed all possible configurations you'll ever need... we called it CLIP (CLuster Installtion Package). My two years experience taught me two things:
1. It's sometimes easier to script your way through, instead of adapting existing administration tools. You'll just have a peek first, of course...
2. But when you must, you'll encounter a modification you'd want very quickly.
So my advice would be only accept open source administration systems. As i'm sure others have reached the same conclusions i had, This is actually a win-win move by IBM, and i'm sure they'll get more users, and more income following.

I really want to see someone answering this :

[unity100]

IBM has been supporting the Open source community but has the community returned the favor?

Re:Sweet

[Anpheus]

If each supercomputer contains a hundred thousand CPUs, they only need to sell TEN supercomputers.

If each mainframe contains a hundred CPUs, they only need to sell ten thousand mainframes.

See, those are quantities that help make sense of this. A Blue Gene/P installation can use up to nearly 900,000 processors alone.

So yes, IBM probably does ship more CPUs than Apple does. IBM doesn't just fabricate and sell Power chips either, so I'd say there's probably a pretty wide margin.

Re:Sweet

[Anpheus]

There's an IBM chip in every one of the three major consoles, which have sold around 50 million units in 2 years.

And that's a small part of their business. IBM sells a lot more chips, period, than probably anyone other than Intel or maybe there's an ARM manufacturer that does more business. But IBM also fabs ARM CPUs, so there you go.