IBM creating supercomputer for weather prediction

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By Dan Neel

(IDG) -- IBM on Friday announced it has embarked on the creation of a new supercomputer that should reign as one of the fastest of its kind for weather forecasting for the next several years.

The 130-ton colossus called Blue Storm will be an IBM eServer Cluster 1600 based on Big Blue's p690 Unix server technology, according to Peter Ungaro, vice president of high performance computing at IBM, in Armonk, N.Y.

Blue Storm and will go live in early 2002 at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), in Shinfield Park, Reading, England. There, Blue Storm will calculate atmospheric projections atop IBM's AIX-L operating system to assist scientists in determining weather patterns.

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Blue Storm will be built out over the course of the next several years, debuting with a 7TF (teraflop) computing capacity and growing to just over 20TF by 2004, said Ungaro.

The exact number of IBM Power4 processors that will be used in Blue Storm to achieve its computing capacity is not clear, according to an IBM representative who said IBM could only estimate that the number would be "over a thousand."

Ungaro said that the ECMWF requested that the winner of the contract bid for the ECMWF supercomputer "deliver a machine roughly five times the sustained performance of their current (computing) environment." Unseated in the process was a ECMWF system from manufacturer Fujitsu.

"(Blue Storm) will most likely be one of the top five machines over the next several years," said Ungaro, who added that improvements in technology during the three-year assembly of Blue Storm could make the supercomputer even faster than IBM has predicted.

How IBM knows Blue Storm will grow to 20TF by 2004 -- without even being sure of the number or processors Blue Storm will start with -- is a matter of modeling the finished system from a smaller supercomputer, said Ungaro.

"We believe we have a very high degree of confidence that we will hit the performance levels," said Ungaro. "We have to do many projections."

Those projections are done taking the entire supercomputing system in to account, not just the number of processors. Supercomputers like Blue Storm are complex balancing acts between the processors, the memory, the I/O components, and the applications, and bottlenecks within them "tend to move around as you scale," said Ungaro.

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.