Cyclops64 (formerly known as

Blue Gene Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption. The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, ...

/C) is a cellular architecture in development by IBM. The Cyclops64 project aims to create the first " supercomputer on a chip".

History

Cyclops64 is part of the

effort, to produce the next several generations of supercomputers. The projects were started in response to the announced construction of the

Earth Simulator The is a series of supercomputers deployed at Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology Yokohama Institute of Earth Sciences. Earth Simulator (first generation) The first generation of Earth Simulator, developed by the Japanese go ...

. Cyclops64 is a cooperative project between the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

(which is partially funding the project), the

U.S. Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secur ...

, industry ( IBM in particular), and

academia An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, ...

. The architecture was conceived by Seymour Cray Award winner Monty Denneau, who is currently leading the project.

Architecture overview

Each

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A compu ...

Cyclops64 chip (processor) will run at 500 megahertz and contain 80 processors. Each processor will have two thread units and a

floating point unit Floating may refer to: * a type of dental work performed on horse teeth * use of an isolation tank * the guitar-playing technique where chords are sustained rather than scratched * ''Floating'' (play), by Hugh Hughes * Floating (psychological ...

. A thread unit is an in-order

RISC core with 32 kB scratch pad memory, using a 60-instruction subset of the Power ISA instruction set. Five processors share a 32 kB instruction cache. The processors will be connected with a 96 port, 7 stage non-internally blocking crossbar switch. They will communicate with each other via global interleaved memory (memory that can be written to and read by all threads) in the SRAM. The theoretical peak performance of a Cyclops64 chip is 80 gigaflops (this assumes a continuous stream of multiply–accumulate instructions, each of which are counted as two floating-point operations). A full system (consisting of 2 thread units per processor, 80 processors per chip, 1 chip per board, 48 boards per midplane, 3 midplanes per rack, and 96 (12 x 8) racks per system) would contain 13,824 C64 chips, consisting of 1,105,920 processors capable of running 2,211,840 concurrent threads.

Software

Cyclops64 exposes much of the underlying hardware to the programmer, allowing the programmer to write very high performance, finely tuned software. One negative consequence is that efficiently programming Cyclops64 is difficult. {{Citation needed, date=August 2009 The system is expected to support TiNy-Threads (a threading library developed at the

University of Delaware The University of Delaware (colloquially UD or Delaware) is a public land-grant research university located in Newark, Delaware. UD is the largest university in Delaware. It offers three associate's programs, 148 bachelor's programs, 121 ma ...

) and

POSIX Threads POSIX Threads, commonly known as pthreads, is an execution model that exists independently from a language, as well as a parallel execution model. It allows a program to control multiple different flows of work that overlap in time. Each flow o ...

Design and fabrication

Verification testing and system software development is being done at the

External links

Technical description of the Cyclops64 architecture and system software
(

Gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and i ...

ped PostScript file) *
Overviev of the architecture
*
A Detailed Analysis of the Architecture
IBM microprocessors