IBM Pitches Supercomputing Fastball

March 10, 2006: IBM says it has boosted supercomputing data speeds by more than 600%, a breakthrough that could change the way large computer networks access and share data.

Using 104 Power-based eServer p575 nodes and 416 storage controllers in conjunction with the IBM designed Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Purple Blue Gene supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in California and IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) software, “Project Fastball” demonstrated a sustained 102GB+ per second read-and-write performance on a single file.

This amounts to a 600% jump in the speed of data, or as Chris Maher, development director for HPC development at IBM put it, the equivalent of “downloading 25,000 songs in a second.”

"This kind of capability opens doors to new kinds of applications in high-performance computing," he said. "It's not just 1,500 servers, but a collection of 1,500 servers that act like a single computer system."

IBM uses GPFS software to manage the flow of information between the thousands of processors and disk storage devices in its supercomputers. It is pushing to use GPFS on other platforms and exploring ways of adapting it to non-IBM hardware.

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