Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 19:05:54 01/10/02
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On January 10, 2002 at 10:33:37, Brian Richardson wrote: >On January 10, 2002 at 07:48:26, Ed Schröder wrote: > >>http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/12/24/ibm.bluestorm.idg/index.html >> >>For the record, Blue Storm will contain 1.5PB (petabytes) of data by 2004, equal >>to 75,000 20GB PCs. And it will crunch 20 trillion calculations per second, >>meaning that if this reporter used a hand-held calculator to race Blue Storm to >>20 trillion calculations, I would be running behind by 17 million years, >>according to IBM. >> >>Also, chess players be warned, Blue Storm at its apex, will be 1,700 times >>faster than Deep Blue, the super computer that beat chess champion Garry >>Kasparov, IBM officials said. > >There are many ways to measure "speed". While I have not looked at it in detail >yet, I doubt that it will be 1,700 faster than DB for chess. However, it is >interesting since the basic node is the p690, which can have up to 32 way SMP >(1.3GHz). There are many configuration options utilizing IBM's Power4 CPUs, >some with shared L2 cache (Power4 enables 2way on chip SMP), some with dedicated >L2 and only one CPU per chip. They are packaged in MCM modules (much like >mainframes), and each module has L3 and memory speed about 13GB/sec (to up to >256GB of memory). Thus each node is pretty much shared memory. Then you have >to look at clustering, and it is unlear how many nodes will be supported. running on one node is cool thing, but more than one node then also gigabytes of data a second is not enough for communication speed. you can get of course a great speedup on a single node, but that's it simply. then speedup stops. The latency for communication between the nodes is going to be just *too* slow. 32 x 1.3 Ghz is real interesting. Then we of course do not know what such a processor is. Usually it is slower than PC processors are for chess. Is there any crafty benchmark about these processors? If not it's probably a processor in IBMs dreams :) Any URL to technical documentation about the processor, if i would guess now i would guess it to be P2 speed at 1.3Ghz and not K7 speed... Nevertheless 32 x 1.3Ghz with shared memory is going to give a decent speedup if all the 32 processors have SHARED memory with all the processors. Estimating the price of a 32 shared memory 1.3Ghz node is pretty hard though, so is delivery time. At the time it gets delivered we already have a dual 5 Ghz or something available at the stores? 32 x 1.3Ghz sounds a lot less impressive then :) >> >>============ >> >>I am sold, have ordered the thing with my VISA card. >> >>Anxious waiting for delivery, start porting Rebel, increase the maximum depth to >>256 ply. The end of computer chess. >> >>Ed
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