A Computer Capable of “Hosting the Entire Internet as an Application”

Falling under the “Holy-crap-that’s-nuts” category, IBM is exploring a 67.1m-core computer capable "of hosting the entire internet as an application."

The mega system is linked to a vamped up version of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers, which are popular among the high performance crowd. Four of the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world rely on the Blue Gene architecture, including the world's very fastest machine: the Blue Gene/L at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. IBM researchers have proposed tweaking the Blue Gene systems to run today's most popular web applications such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and others.

"We hypothesize that for a large class of web-scale workloads the Blue Gene/P platform is an order of magnitude more efficient to purchase and operate than the commodity clusters in use today," the IBM researchers wrote.

While both large SMP (symmetric multi-processing) systems and clusters have their advantages for massive computing tasks, most organizations that crunch through really big jobs seem to prefer clusters, which provide some economic benefits. For example, customers can buy multiple general purpose hardware and networking components cheaply and then cobble the systems together to surpass even the performance of gigantic SMPs.

Google, Amazon.com, and Microsoft are just a few of the large companies using these clusters to offer software, processing power and storage to other businesses. Customers can then tap into these larger systems to "grow" their applications as needed by firing up more and more of the provided computing infrastructure.

But IBM may have a better idea all together. They want to use Blue Gene boxes for web software jobs to run numerous applications on a single box more efficiently, reliably and at a lower cost than a cluster. This would also potentially resolve clusters’ other notable disadvantages, including the amount of space and energy required.

Under a project code-named 'Kittyhawk,' IBM has started running new types of applications on Blue Gene with comparable performance to today's clusters. But that may be just the beginning. According to the researchers, the architecture of Blue Gene gives IBM a "hybrid" approach where they can get the best of both the SMP and cluster worlds.

"The key fact to note is that the nodes themselves can be viewed for the most part as general purpose computers, with processors, memory and external IO," they wrote. "The one major exception to this is that the cores have been extended with an enhanced floating point unit to enable super-computing workloads."

Looks like Blue Gene might have a more exciting future ahead then just computing lab experiments.

Posted by Rebecca Sato.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/01/cheap-prolific.html

Comments

Not good. What happens to "Internet Free Speech" when one company controls the entire web?

Posted by: Alkhemist | February 09, 2008 at 08:32 AM

This is a cool development, but I don't think having the whole internet dependent on just one machine is a great idea. Imagine the whole internet going down, even for a moment.
.
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
risk the internet
.

Posted by: USpace | February 09, 2008 at 06:13 PM

agreed, the entire internet on one system sounds way to... "top down." the best thing about the internet is that no one owns it. though i doubt that IBM will own the internet, the idea sounds nefarious.

Posted by: Mirror Man | February 12, 2008 at 03:37 PM

Absolutely!

Posted by: USpace | February 12, 2008 at 05:42 PM