IBM Touts Supercomputers for Enterprise 94
Stony Stevenson writes "IBM has announced an initiative to offer smaller versions of its high-performance computers to enterprise customers. The first new machine is a QS22 BladeCenter server powered by a Cell processor. Developed to power gaming systems, the Cell chip has also garnered interest from the supercomputing community owing to its ability to handle large amounts of floating point calculations. IBM hopes that the chips, which currently power climate modeling and other traditional supercomputing tasks, will also appeal to customers ranging from financial analysis firms to animation studios."
Oblig.. (Score:4, Funny)
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You can run 65,535 or 100,000 instances of it, whichever comes first.
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That's a Welsh pass time, and I'm English!
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Wrong question. The correct question is: Will it run Java?
;-)
No? Then What The !@#$ have you been selling me WebFear^W^W^W^WSphere for?
BTW, for all you Eclipse lovers? NEVER install Rational Application Developer (RAD). IBM managed to take a half-decent product, add tons of suck to it, and make sure it was the SLOWEST application in the history of mankind. You need at least 4GB to run it at a decent speed. Which is pretty sad when you consider that Windows only goes up to 3.5...
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Sorry, too distracted by my new Mac.
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i.e.
s/\^W/\^H/g
Java? Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
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I've worked in that industry for over 20 years and I assure you that the developers are the same run-of-the-mill klutzes as are found in any shop in the USA. Most are definitely not Google material.
OTOH the software libraries are thoroughly picked over, having been developed over the last 50 years and scrutinized by many eyes. So it's pretty good code, but nothing like NASA's.
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It hits "good enough" on enough of these points -- familiarity, memory safety, concurrency support, comprehensive library, ubiquit
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Have you tried turning it on? (Score:1)
You're SO lucky. (Score:2)
I am unable to get my Vista box to crash
You are *incredibly* lucky.
My brother has a fairly recent computer (AMD Phenom, ATI 3870X2, AMD 790 : All hardware has Vista drivers). Antivirus/FireWall/Updates. He's not exactly the kind to install every possible widget and explorer-bar.
Vista will systematically crash every couple of days, sometimes even twice a day.
Whenever we try googling the latest error message du jour to get some online help, AFTER THE FEW FIRST LETTERS in the search box of Firefox, GOOGLE ALREADY SUGGESTS the exact message DOWN TO
First, open the box... (Score:2)
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Re:Oblig.. And I was going to say, (Score:1)
The trend towards commodity hardware continues... (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I'm sick of managing farms of physical servers, and with the introduction of VMWare, I'm now managing 3x the number of machines (albeit virtual machines). Have an FTP server? Run that in it's own image. Also have a syslog server? Yet another virtual machine. I really hope this sells well. Maybe I can now play PS3 games in the datacenter.
Re:The trend towards commodity hardware continues. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The trend towards commodity hardware continues. (Score:5, Insightful)
> physical servers, and with the introduction of
> VMWare, I'm now managing 3x the number of
> machines (albeit virtual machines).
All those Virtual machines to do the same thing with 4 times the resources as one well configured Linux box. Tsk Tsk.
Oh, but don't you LOOK busy.....
Re:The trend towards commodity hardware continues. (Score:4, Insightful)
Which as you have no doubt discovered, are sort of a PITA to administer because they're all in separate VMs. I suspect the next big thing in commodity server virtualization will be nice management interfaces and protocols that break down some of the management walls between VMs, while still leaving the more important parts of the virtual environment intact. And being able to change the hardware assigned to a VM on the fly will probably become more common, too. I'd give it 5 or 6 more years, and VMWare will probably have managed to reinvent the LPAR.
Gotta love how this stuff goes around in cycles. Anything cool today in microcomputers was probably boring people to tears 10 or 15 years ago on large systems. (Cf. multitasking, multiple users, parallel processing, network-oriented filesystems, virtualization, hypervisors...)
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If you have looked at the new Virtual Center, you can now patch all types of virtual machines using the VM console, even while they are off. They are obviously reading the files of the virtuals to see what patch levels they are at, etc. It is only a small step from there to see what services are running and us
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OK then what are the interesting technologies currently happening in large systems ?
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Don't get me wrong, it definately had its uses and we do use it some where I work, but it's not the be-all end-all that VMWare and co. would like you to believe. Basically if you're not using it for:
a) Test environments
or
b) Services + apps that don't play well with others
then it is probably a waste of resources. Like you said, running a virtual machine for just an FTP server is absurd...."Let's use 50x the ram and hard drive space necessary for an FTP server
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ex. 1 Print servers. Zebra drivers dont play nice with other drivers.
b) Services + apps that don't play well with others
ex 2. I run several MS SQL servers, all of which are no bigger than 1 proc, 2gb of ram virtuals.
A well configured box could host them with n*384 less overhead. I dont know about windows but under linux you can ad drivers to lvm and expand partitions.
But you have to learn to ignore the specs presented and translate it into the virtual world. When you do that, you do not waste resources. You still have the overhead of running windows for each SQL server, for SQL that may not be significant (its still 10% of your spec) & the overhead of unusable ram, HDD space, processing time.
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2) I'm no SQL guru by any means, but why can't you just run multiple databases in a single SQL instance? I guess it could be some proprietary crap with licensing I suppose, but I would think for mose things you can consolidate them. I know we have some DBs that share a single instance.
And my main point was tha
Re:The trend towards commodity hardware continues. (Score:1, Insightful)
Ya know thats a pci requirement, right?
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Re:The trend towards commodity hardware continues. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen more than my share of traditionally big iron applicatoins (databases, data warehousing etc..) being moved off of specialized hardware (ibm p595s, sun e15k, HPSuperdomes etc..) being moved onto (or attempted to) commodity hardware.
I'm honestly curious. How well does this really work out for databases and data warehousing?
One of the benefits I understand from going with one big-ass server is that the memory to pipelines between cpu and memory are much better than the ethernet/myrinet/infiband/whatever connections between cluster nodes.
Depending how you're going to be doing the clustering, you're either going to have some type of cluster fs or you're going to be using a shared NAS rather than SAN for the data. This is also going to
Flamage (Score:5, Funny)
That's just what we need to introduce to enterprise computing, the flame wars and invectives of the console world.
Admin #1 cell totally rockzorz!!!11!!!1 u n00bs using virtualization are in the past
Admin #2 IBM SUCKS!!! YOU KNOW IT!!! YOUR WHOLE BUSINESS IS TOTALLY GAY FOR THEM!!!!
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Re: Flamage du jour? (Score:3, Insightful)
(Usual disclaimer: I'm in the IBM food chain, but I don't speak for anyone and I don't know anything.)
Re: Flamage du jour? (Score:4, Interesting)
The UI and i/o shelled through the x86 system. There are examples of this in some smaller embedded systems where system memory is separate from user memory etc. The details of this seem sketchy as I have not worked them out to any degree that would make the proposal sound workable thus far. I do know of examples where techniques like this are used to protect the 'system' while 'user agents' do what they want without the intrusion of security software at every turn. When the system is turned off, the user space is cleared. The protected system space is always protected.
Yes, that leaves room for infections on the Cell side to act like root kits as there is always some spot that is vulnerable, but it does offer a much more bullet resistant setup. The effects are not too different from working from a live CD all the time. Reboot and all is clean again, but with a more permanent and less inconvenient process. If you run some version of Linux/Unix on the client side, and strictly control the communications to the Cell side it becomes a much tighter box to try to squeeze a virus into. It may provide opportunity for the Cell side to monitor processes in the client/UI side meaning that keyloggers and such wou9ld become a thing of the past. In general, I mean to add horsepower by splitting system tasks from UI tasks and add a much stronger sandbox for the client to operate in, rather than continue lumping all the work on one cpu and letting security run in the same sandbox as the questionable software.
It's an idea... obviously I do not design motherboards or OSes for a living (IANACSPHD ??)
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Additionally, with SaaS and GoogleApps et al, you can see the value of the mainframe/client
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In some ways it might help to think about the Cell in comparison with a CDC 6600--but they probably stopped production on those before the average
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Grrr lameness filter says I'm yelling.
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Let me guess (Score:3, Funny)
no I'm not yelling, you dillhole
Re:Let me guess (Score:4, Funny)
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Scotty was heard to say... (Score:4, Funny)
SCOTTY: Computer. Computer! Hello computer!
SAM PALMISANO: Uh, just use the keyboard.
SCOTTY: Keyboard... how quaint.
All I want to know is.. (Score:1)
Yes, It Does Run Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
That means that a PS3 running Linux [psubuntu.com], even with its ridiculously low 512MB RAM, can be used as a $500 development platform for these CellBE BladeServers.
And, in turn, some QS22 SW might be usable on the PS3, if it can be ported to use the tiny RAM. Or if someone hooks an i-RAM bank to the SATA port as swap/ramdisk, using perhaps iSCSI over its Gb-e for storage.
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And there's the i-RAM I mentioned.
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Yes, Terrasoft promotes the PS3 as a cheap testbed/devstation for Cell blades, been doing so practically since the PS3 launch. They even sell individual PS3's with Linux pre-installed, as well as clusters.
If IBM their ServRAID controller right... (Score:2)
IBM pricing (Score:1, Insightful)
Speaking as someone who architects, implements and maintains systems for animation studios, the sorts of dollars IBM ask for *anything* means they'll never appeal to animation studios.
There's only one Pixar and there's only one ILM. The other million animation studios out there don't have budgets even close t
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There's only one Pixar and there's only one ILM. The other million animation studios out there don't have budgets even close to these guys, particularly considering the turn around on hardware (today's super cluster is tomorrow's pile of junk). Renderfarms will be staying with cheaper vendors (which also means white box for most) for some time to come yet.
I understand your argument, but there's an upside. Maybe someone will put energy into Cell processor renderfarm software, so all the fiscally-challenged shops can buy a small rack of PS3s and go at it? IBM or not, the Cell is still a damn quick CPU for serious number crunching (say raytracing, etc).
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Which Enterprise? (Score:2)
[ ] NX1
[ ] NCC1701
[ ] NCC1701 A
[ ] NCC1701 B
[ ] NCC1701 C
[ ] NCC1701 D
[ ] NCC1701 E
Re:Which Enterprise? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Which Enterprise? (Score:5, Funny)
M5? (Score:2)
This is a Failure (Score:4, Informative)
I'll begin first by listing the positives:
It has very good single precision floating point performance
Very high bandwidth on chip (25 GB/s)
With the e[nhanced]D[ouble]P[recision] addition to it IBM is adding for Los Alamos' Road Runner, it should be even better.
IBM Developerworks is a useful resource for programmers
It's a processor that gives the academic community a chance to publish more papers
The negatives:
Far too expensive
Floating point performance, single or otherwise, is useless for most enterprise work (no point running a database on a Cell)
The things that makes the Cell fast and unique are the SPEs (SIMD processors) are useless for servers*(I'll elaborate below)
Developing software to make use of the SPEs is time consuming and difficult. Orders of magnitude more so if your algorithm isn't suited for being split across SPEs
Computer Science or Engineering students who are doing research in this field have to read redundant papers that reword the IBM Cell manual (plagarism?) for 70% of it and what they actually did with the Cell for about 10%. 20% is of course left for citations.
You can't actually play games on a Cell. The PS3 games use them for physics engines, sound or such; the video is done on a video card.
Worst of all, YOU HAVE TO GET DATA FROM MAIN MEMORY TO SPU'S CACHE YOURSELF! (also known as Local Store, 256KB)
Now to talk about the SPEs... They are what makes the Cell tick. If the Cell didn't have them, it would just be an old Mac processor. (IBM Power 4 was it? I've trying to avoid research papers on the Cell) The graduate students (a year away from a PhD) that I was observing who were doing developing a scientific application on the Cell.. when we summed their year in development, they essentially told me it was a pain in the ass. Why? Because you have to get data from main memory to local store. Imagine if you had to get data from memory to your x86 processors L2 or L1 cache. (No, you don't actually want that. Trust me, you don't.) Scientists don't want to develop applications on this platform. Researchers like it because they can publish papers talking about it. This is why Los Alamos' Road Runner might be a flop. Bye bye to $100m of US tax payer money.
Back to the discussion with the grad students... I then came up with the idea that the Cell would be perfectly suited to an Asterix server. Why? Because sometimes Asterix needs to convert from one format to another when audio codecs differ. This is a perfect SIMD application, except we have a problem. While the Cell does have great on chip bandwidth, it has very poor Power5 processor (PPU) to SPU latency*. There is a research paper out there that puts PPU initiated memory transfers to SPU latency at about 4 microseconds. Compare this to SPU initiated transfer to SPU latency of about a tenth of a microsecond. Huge difference. You can't really avoid this unless you want to develop something horrendous that avoid the PPU but that's unlikely. The PPU would run the actual server and then it would need to notify the SPU of data, either by sending message (slow) and the SPU getting the data itself (2*slow=2slow) or sending the data and a message (slower).
It will be about 5 years until good software development tools are written for this architecture that will address most of the issues. This is assuming that IBM doesn't ditch it, which seemed likely before this announcement.
Oh, by the way, the QS22 doesn't support a hard drive which means you need fast NFS. The cost of ownership is more than just the cost of single blade.
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These people are not alone, but it looks like they are not the most "advanced" when it comes to programming the Cell.
More and more games developers are starting to "appreciate" the Cell.
No, the Cell is not meant to be to take on the X86 market. So running a MySQL DB on the Cell is not a good idea.
IBM are targetting specific markets/customers.
One project where you see the tremendous power of the Cell is with the Folding proje
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Oh, by the way, the QS22 doesn't support a hard drive which means you need fast NFS. The cost of ownership is more than just the cost of single blade.
Ever heard of SAN boot? 4Gb or 8Gb access to SAN disk isn't fast enough for you? Give yourself some time and you'll see FCoE (single 10GigEthernet interface carrying both IP and FibreChannel on a single interface) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCoE [wikipedia.org] and there are already shipping products http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9670/index.html [cisco.com]
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Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
The chip was not designed to replace any type of general purpose processor in the Enterprise space. Cell is a large parallel FP number cruncher. So, no, databases or file servers and other solution that basically involves moves data around between storage and the network, is not a good fit.
Real time Video/Audio transcoding and distribution on the other hand, if needed in an Enterprise shop so
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...
Oh, by the way, the QS22 doesn't support a hard drive which means you need fast NFS. The cost of ownership is more than just the cost of single blade.
This is misleading. It is always more than the cost of a single blade when dealing with bladecenters; Chassis, network modules, SAN modules, redundant power, etc... You only need one server, buy a rack mount or desktop workstation. Bladecenters are for when you need many that stay up as long as possible. 7-14 is where it shines.
A FiberChannel card connected to external storage unit will work fine. Bladecenters were designed for complete redundancy and internal HDs (regardless of RAID config) are crud
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I want to take issue with one of your negatives, however. The programmable local store is one of the best features of the Cell and actually simplifies programming for performance significantly. Once you get used to moving data and code from main memory to local store (admittedly a foreign concept for most programmers weened on Java/Ruby/PHP/etc)
Really, editors. (Score:1, Troll)
For future reference, this also goes for the terms 'Serenity','Falcon', and 'Nebuchadnezzar.'
Oh darn (Score:2)
Oh well.
Not many people will be able to afford such high end PCs. I myself can't, that's for sure.
And here I got my hopes up... (Score:2)
To quote Patton Oswalt, "My geekiness is getting in the way of my nerdiness."
Of course it's for enterprise... (Score:2, Insightful)
because you and I can't afford a $10k blade let alone the rack slot farm to put it in.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/hardware/servers/qs22/index.html [ibm.com]
(browse and buy)
The updates to it, DDR2 and better floating point, those are nice.
Now if they would make a small system, somewhere between a mini-mac and a shuttle pc in size,
DVD/RW, 2 Gb lan ports, some usb, basic video, 2 or 4 gigs ram (or empty memory slots we could fill ourselves) and a place for a SATA drive
not us
What's so great about Cell? (Score:2)
Back when x86 chips had at most two cores, that made the Cell look pretty good. But...
- Intel chips now have 4 cores, with 8 on the horizon.
- It was a PITA to program the Cell, because it's not a
shared-memory architecture. The cores need to communicate
via message passing. And in the c
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I'm not sure what kind of 'scientific' computations you were doing, but it sounds like you were not using the SPUs properly.
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We were doing acoustic ray tracing. The problem we had was that any branching that occurred quickly led to different rays needing different *kinds* of operations. So it really wasn't practical or efficient to keep on tracing four or even two rays concurrently using the S
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Free book: Programming on Cell (Score:1)