|
|
ONLINE FEATURES
Book Reviews
BW Video
Columnists
Interactive Gallery
Newsletters
Past Covers
Philanthropy
Podcasts
Special Reports
BLOGS
Auto Beat
Bangalore Tigers
Blogspotting
Brand New Day
Byte of the Apple
Economics Unbound
Eye on Asia
Fine On Media
Green Biz
Hot Property
Investing Insights
Management IQ
NEXT: Innovation
NussbaumOnDesign
Tech Beat
Working Parents
TECHNOLOGY
J.D. Power Ratings
Product Reviews
Tech Stats
Wildstrom: Tech Maven
AUTOS
Home Page
Auto Reviews
Classic Cars
Car Care & Safety
Hybrids
INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | |
JUNE 14, 2005
By Otis Port A Lightning Bolt from Big Blue IBM's new number-cruncher is the world's second-fastest -- and likely to be the first hope of researchers tackling science's toughest riddles IBM has just switched on the biggest number-crunching beast in private industry. Located at Big Blue's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., the new computer can spit out more than 91 trillion calculations a second. Yes, you read that right: 91 trillion calculations a second, or 91 teraflops, in industry jargon. This incredible speed ranks it as the world's second-fastest supercomputer. The only speedier machine is the mammoth, 367-teraflops system that IBM (IBM ) is installing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for research on nuclear weapons. Both are based on IBM's innovative BlueGene/L architecture. However, another IBM computer, now also being installed at Lawrence Livermore, will edge into the No. 2 slot by a slim margin later this year. (For a list of the world's current and upcoming speedsters, see BusinessWeek's Top 25 Supercomputers.) LINING UP. What sort of research needs such souped-up computers? A lot of today's problems in engineering and science. For example, in chemistry and physics issues abound that would keep every computer in the world grinding away for centuries. And aerospace, automotive, and biotechnology researchers know of problems so tough that they would take decades to solve. Obviously, nobody bothers to try. Not yet, anyhow. For its new 91-teraflops monster -- dubbed Watson Blue Gene, or BGW for short -- IBM has plenty of down-to-earth work to keep it busy. Untangling the riddle of how proteins fold to work their magic in the human body is the initial target. Two others: probing new frontiers in semiconductor physics and learning to harness nanotechnology for tomorrow's chips and materials. IBM will also make BGW available to outside researchers. Under a novel Energy Dept. program called INCITE (in case you're wondering, the acronym was cooked up from this: Innovative & Novel Computational Impact on Theory & Experiment), researchers from industry and academia will be awarded up to 5% of BGW's capacity. INCITE now steals 10% of IBM's 10-teraflops supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Berkeley, Calif., and the 5-teraflops BlueGene/L machine at Argonne National Laboratory. LIMITLESS HORIZONS. What makes INCITE so special is that it provides enormous chunks of continuous computer time to a single researcher or team. For instance, a study of combustion in jet engines was awarded 2.5 million processor-hours; that's 16 days on NERSC's 6,656-processor system. Traditionally, such huge problems have been given short blocks of time over intermittent periods. So polishing off one run can sometimes stretch into months, with lots of thumb-twiddling in between. And then come the multiple iterations that are almost always necessary to refine previous results. The idea behind INCITE, says Ray Orbach, head of Energy's Office of Science, is to accelerate key scientific discoveries and boost U.S. competitiveness in such industries as biotech, computing, materials, and petrochemicals. "This could mean giving somebody the whole machine for a week or even a month," says Orbach, who hatched INCITE two years ago. "That had never been done before." Powerful machines like BGW will "help to really accelerate discoveries in science and engineering," predicts Tilak Agerwala, a vice-president at IBM Research. With its blazing speed, he adds, researchers and engineers "can now ask more questions, test more theories, try more designs, and simulate more conditions than has been possible before." SIMULATION WIZARDY. Orbach insists that access to supercomputers "needs to be more like electricity, so people can get the time they need when they need it." This metaphor is regularly used with respect to utility computing, on-demand computing, and grid computing -- three buzzwords for the hot trend of running programs on computers scattered hither and yon across the Internet. Most major hardware vendors have set up computer farms that rent out just the amount of processing time a company or research lab needs. Even humongous programs can be run without spending megabucks to buy a supercomputer. This will be increasingly vital to both scientific advances and industrial competitiveness. Researchers are now bumping up against tough problems so convoluted that they can be tackled only with computer simulations. That's why Orbach and other gurus insist scientific progress will no longer be determined by the usual interplay between theory and experiment. "Simulation will be the third leg of the stool," says Orbach. While clusters of personal computers and servers are adequate for many types of simulations, others will continue to require behemoths like BlueGene. "You can do things on a single machine that you just can't do by spreading the computing all over the place," says Orbach. THE MISSION: "OUT-COMPUTE." In materials science and climate modeling, he notes, something can happen in one part of the model that has long-range effects on other parts of the model. If those distant segments of the model have been parceled out to physically remote computers, Orbach explains, "the other computers have to wait for data to come in, and the simulation bogs down." Even minor hiccups in simulations could be detrimental to competitiveness. Bob Bishop, chairman of Silicon Graphics (SGI ), summed up the situation nicely is his oft-quoted maxim: "To out-compete in the 21st century, U.S. industry must out-compute." So there's no end in sight to ever-faster supercomputers.
 Port is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York Edited by Ira Sager
BW MALL
SPONSORED LINKS
Buy a link now!Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
 Copyright 2005, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.Terms of Use | Privacy Notice |
Printer-Friendly Version
