Photos: The birth of a supercomputer

Rochester is the home of the Blue Gene supercomputer, and is also the birthplace of the AS400. The man who developed both, IBM chief scientist Frank Soltis, believes that the weather in chilly Rochester helps to develop better engineers and scientists. "There is not much else to do here," he says.

IBM claims that it supplies more than half the supercomputing capacity in the world, with 219 systems currently installed. The most prominent is Blue Gene, a much more powerful version of Deep Blue, the computer that beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov back in 1997.

What makes Blue Gene so unusual in supercomputing circles is that it is wholly based on the Power PC architecture, instead of a proprietary processor. That's the Power 4 processor, too, not the faster, later Power 5.

Power 4 is most suitable, IBM says, because it is not as highly clocked as other processors, so it produces less heat. The result is that Power 4 chips can be packed very closely together which helps in performance (cutting the distance travelled increases the speed of operations) and also lowers cost, as there is no need for expensive water-cooling.

This is the Blue Gene assembly area. The components are brought together here and assembled. The blue boxes to the left are a single unit under assembly. The racks will be assembled from left to right. The white boxes above the rack and then to the right are the air conditioning that will cool the system. A stack of boards is shown to the right of the picture.

The computer is made out of node boards which carry the processors. There are 32 processors on each board which, as the picture shows, can be densely packed together. There is less need for complex electronics around the processors as Blue Gene is the ultimate system designed to do only one job at a time — probably a very big job indeed, but only the one.

This is a single unit of the supercomputer, and contains 256 processors. The advantage of the Power 4 architecture becomes clear — not only are the processors close together but the boards are stacked closely and the units can be close together too. That all helps provide the high performance that is essential for supercomputing.

This picture shows several feet of space below the systems. This is essential to the performance of Blue Gene as it allows a lot of air to circulate below the systems as well as above. Any company buying a supercomputer needs to be well prepared for those physical demands, but if they can afford a supercomputer they should be able to afford to pay for a little digging.

A fully assembled, but naked, Blue Gene. When completed there is no need for the fans at the top of the system as it is air cooled by its own methods. The vents to the left are an important part of the process. One of the fastest Blue Genes is in an assembly like this at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, which is run by the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Picture © IBM