IBM
launched an Epic project with an almost unfathomable goal -- to develop a
single supercomputer capable of running the entire internet as a web
application. The project, codenamed Kittyhawk (detailed in
a white paper by IBM) created quite the stir in internet technology
community. While the software details descend quickly into the realm of the
cerebral, one number that jumps off the page is the estimate for the number of
cores and memory for the finished proposed system -- 67.1 million cores with
32PB of memory.
The system is based on IBM's Blue Gene/P architecture, which takes millions of
cores and arranges them in a hierarchal architecture. At the lowest level four
850 MHz Power PC cores run on a single chip, with built in memory controllers
and interconnects. The next level up is the card, which contains 32 of these
quad core chips known as "nodes." Up a level, 16 cards compose a midplane. A
server rack has two midplanes, yielding a total of 1024 nodes, or 4096
processors. Each server rack has 2TB of memory to play with. A maximum of 16,384
racks can be networked to yield the finally staggering metrics. As each rack has
an I/O bandwidth of 640Gb/s, a "full" 67.1m core system would sport 10.4Pb/s of
bandwidth.
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