IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet

The Register ^ | 5 February 2008 | Ashlee Vance

[ShadowAce]

[RightWhale]

Assume it can be done. It won’t be done since the Internet is supposed to be a survivable system and that means dispersal of pieces and parts not coagulating everything into one box in one building.

[Condor51]

But can it play Chess?

[John Jorsett]

67 million of them will be dedicated to porn.

[ClearCase_guy]

With today’s internet, you need to cut five major cables in order to blackout a country like Iran. In the future, you’ll be able to cut one cable and blackout the world.

[vikingd00d]

>> In theory, you can connect up to 16,384 racks, providing up to 67.1m cores with 32PB of memory. That’ll get some work done.

Now that would make a fairly respectable Quake box. :)

[Centurion2000]

. In theory, you can connect up to 16,384 racks, providing up to 67.1m cores with 32PB of memory. That'll get some work done.

Each rack boasts IO bandwidth of 640Gb/s, which puts our theoretical system at 10.4Pb/s.

Fine, now show me the backplane and internet backbone that runs at over 100 GB/sec. Networking is not nearly advanced enough to centralize the internet.

[CarrotAndStick]

F@ck chess, can it play Doom?

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

IBM still exists? Weren’t they bought by the Chinese Lenovo?

[Egon]

IBM's researchers have proposed tweaking the Blue Gene systems to run today's most popular web applications such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and Ruby on Rails.

Who writes this stuff?

[CarrotAndStick]

Only the laptop and PC assembly division; not their core technologies.

[11th Commandment]

I bet SkyNet is behind this plan. Go get Sarah Connor

[Izzy Dunne]

Each rack boasts IO bandwidth of 640Gb/s,

640 Gb/s ought to be enough for anybody.

[11th Commandment]

I bet SkyNet is behind this plan. Go get em Sarah Connor

[duckman]

Do you still have to code 1401 overlay modules? Am I showing my age?

[tx_eggman]

Now that would make a fairly respectable Quake box

Talk about bringing the network to it's knees on your lunch break ...

[willgolfforfood]

Skynet, is that you?

[decimon]

67 million of them will be dedicated to porn.

I think that's the Ruby on Rails stuff.

[r9etb]

So, IBM wants to angle Blue Gene boxes at the web software jobs, believing it can run numerous applications on a single box at a lower cost than a cluster.

IBM has been very successful in implementing mainframe-based systems like this for IT/Help/Multi-user applications for a number of large, widely-spread companies. I've got a friend who has been doing this sort of stuff for several Canadian companies.

For IBM, it sounds like a scale-up project, rather than having to develop any particularly new techology.

Look for them to succeed big with this....