PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System) is IBM's answer to

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Ad ...

's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) initiative. The program resulted in commercial development and deployment of the Power 775, a supercomputer design with extremely high performance ratios in fabric and memory bandwidth, as well as very high performance density and power efficiency. IBM officially announced the Power 775 on July 12, 2011 and started to ship systems in August 2011.

Background

The HPCS program was a three phase research and development effort. IBM was one of three companies, along with Cray and Sun Microsystems, that received the HPCS grant for Phase II. In this phase, IBM collaborated with a consortium of 12 universities and the

Los Alamos National Lab Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in ...

to pursue an adaptable computing system with the goal of commercial viability of new chip technology, new computer architecture, operating systems, compiler and programming environments. IBM was chosen for Phase III in November 2006, and granted $244 million in funds for continuing development of PERCS technology and delivering prototype systems by 2010.

Deployment

The first supercomputer using PERCS technology was intended to be the

Blue Waters Blue Waters was a petascale supercomputer operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved a resolution which auth ...

system, however the high costs and complexity of the system resulted in its contract being canceled. The machine was subsequently delivered by Cray Inc, using a combination of GPUs and CPUs for processing, and a network with reduced global bandwidth capabilities. Power775 / PERCS systems were subsequently deployed at roughly two dozen institutions in the U.S. and other countries, in installations ranging from 2,000 to over 64,000 Power7 processing cores. Major deployments have been for network-intensive and memory-intensive applications (as opposed to FLOPS-intensive), such as weather & climate modeling ( ECMWF, UKMO, Environment Canada,

Japan Meteorological Agency The , abbreviated JMA, is an agency of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. It is charged with gathering and providing results for the public in Japan that are obtained from data based on daily scientific observation an ...

), and scientific research (

University of Warsaw The University of Warsaw ( pl, Uniwersytet Warszawski, la, Universitas Varsoviensis) is a public university in Warsaw, Poland. Established in 1816, it is the largest institution of higher learning in the country offering 37 different fields o ...

Slovak Academy of Sciences The Slovak Academy of Sciences ( sk, Slovenská akadémia vied, or SAV) is the main scientific and research institution in Slovakia fostering basic and strategic basic research. It was founded in 1942, closed after World War II, and then reestab ...

, and several other government laboratories in the U.S., and other countries).

Technology

PERCS will use IBM's large-scale technologies from servers and supercomputers like the

POWER7 POWER7 is a family of superscalar multi-core microprocessors based on the Power ISA 2.06 instruction set architecture released in 2010 that succeeded the POWER6 and POWER6+. POWER7 was developed by IBM at several sites including IBM's Roche ...

microprocessor, AIX operating system, X10 programming language and

General Parallel File System GPFS (General Parallel File System, brand name IBM Spectrum Scale) is high-performance clustered file system software developed by IBM. It can be deployed in shared-disk or shared-nothing distributed parallel modes, or a combination of these. I ...

Power 775

Sometimes known as the POWER7-IH or P7-IH, the Power 775 is the commercial product that was developed by PERCS as a part of

IBM Power Systems Power Systems is a family of server computers from IBM that are based on its Power processors. It was created in 2008 as a merger of the System p and System i product lines. History IBM had two distinct POWER- and PowerPC-based hardware l ...

line. The Power 775 was released by IBM in 2011 as a commercial product after IBM ended its participation in the

petaflops project at the University of Illinois, but marketed the 775 based on the growth of its high-performance computing business. Unlike the IBM

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, ...

series, which uses low-power processors to avoid heat-density issues, the Power 775 was a water-cooled rack-module system, and each module was 34 inches wide, 54 inches deep and 3.5 inches high (2U). Each drawer comprises 8 cache coherent nodes (each of which can host single one or more O/S images) with a MCM with four POWER7 CPUs each, and 16 DDR3 SDRAM slots per MCM for a total of 256 POWER7 cores and 2 TB RAM. Each drawer has 8 optical connect controller hub chips, connecting neighboring MCMs, PCIe peripherals and other compute nodes in a dragonfly network topology. One rack can house up to a dozen Power 775 drawers for a total performance of 96 TFLOPS. The system supports up to 24 terabytes of memory and 230 terabytes of storage per rack. It is estimated to achieve over 94 teraflops per rack.Power 775 specifications
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References

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