IBM The plan is part of its strategy to offer most of its products on-demand. The new center will allow customers and partners to access the system, which offers 5.7 teraflops is offering the Blue Gene supercomputer for remote access at its new Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Center.
Clients will pay only for the capacity they use, said David Gelardi,
vice
president, IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand. The executive also
said
the Armonk, N.Y., company will extend the offer to developers to freely
test
the system, which includes over 2,000 CPUs of PowerPC Blue Gene
technology
running Linux.
“We’re trying to build an ecosystem around Blue Gene so I’m selling
capacity
by the hour,” Gelardi said. “But I’m also making it available free to
software developers — ISVs, research institutions, universities, so
that
they can bring their code and port it, test it, tune it on Blue Gene.”
Gelardi said giving customers the ability to tap large amounts of
computing
power through the center will not only help them regulate computing
resources based on demand, but also head off IT capital expenses and
fixed
costs of buying gear outright.
Blue Gene consumes less power and, at less than one square meter, takes
up
less space than traditional supercomputers from rivals like NEC, Cray
, SGI
, Dell
or Sun
Microsystems.
The first client engagement for Blue Gene on Demand in the new
Rochester
Center will be QuantumBio, a company that makes molecular modeling
tools
that improve the drug discovery process.
The news follows IBM’s November 2004 plan to sell
Blue Gene as a commercial product. This is a departure from its usual
position as a massive system for researching pharmaceutical, weather
forecasting and disease issues.
Gelardi said IBM currently has six paid installs for Blue Gene,
including
one each at Lawrence Livermore and Argonne research labs. That move is
part
of Big Blue’s broader strategy to bring supercomputing to commercial
markets
for drug discovery and product design, animation, business intelligence
and
compliance and risk.
“The pipeline for selling Blue Gene is quite healthy,” Gelardi said,
noting
that IBM chose to put the new on-demand center in Rochester because
that is
where Blue Gene is developed and made.
The new center is Big Blue’s fourth such facility, joining institutions
in
Poughkeepsie, New York, Houston, TX and Montpellier, France. Clients
have
access to over 5,200 CPUs of Intel, AMD Opteron and IBM Power compute
power
to run Linux, Microsoft Windows and IBM AIX operating systems.
Just days before IBM began selling Blue Gene, a BlueGene/L
supercomputer
tailored for nuclear arms research was found to run at a
record 70.72 teraflops, making it the fastest computer on the LINPACK
benchmark test.
Now Open: Blue Gene On Demand
