Super-dense systems

Newtons 3rd law of motion is in essence “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

When x86 and rack systems couldn’t scale up to handle the demands of modern computing, they scaled out. Scale out systems are OK to a point, but soon the complexity and cost of scale out becomes a real hurdle and building plumbing isn’t what most businesses want to pay their employees to do.

The IBM reaction to this has been the recent announcement of two super-dense systems. These are server consolidation platforms on steroids. Earlier this month we announced the new POWER6 “Hydro-Cluster” supercomputer, the Power 575, which has upto 448 processor cores per rack. Today see’s the press announcement of the IBM iDataplex server, an x86-based super-dense server.

In case the benefits of a super-dense system are not obvious, the weekends mysterious video has re-appeared on YouTube. iDataplex is currently a custom build offering rather than a product, and can be built with a range of different cores and boards to suit the application from low power, low heat to high function high power.

The press release on iDataplex is here and the video here.

It takes a team – April Power Systems Announcements

I’ve had a few emails asking me if I was going to write a log entry on this month announcements, and to be honest I wasn’t. They are an impressive list of products, branding and customer announcements. I wasn’t anything to do with them, given I’m no longer asked to do marketing/sales types presentations, I picked that time to go do the Machupichhu/Inca trail trip in Peru.

The April announcements though were a credit to the teamwork across the even more global IBM. Core Processor and server development teams in Austin and Rochester, worked with domain specialists in Poughkeepsie and Boeblingen. On top of this were the software development and test teams in India, China and and ever increasing number of places.

The new UNIX enterprise server, the Power™ 595 is an impressive beast if the charts are anything to go by. I’m hoping to get Nancy to take me across the building to the test bring-up to have an up close and personal look sometime this week. The new POWER6 “Hydro-Cluster” supercomputer, the Power 575, is very impessive using a new super-dense system, with a unique, in-rack, water-cooling system and with 448 processor cores per rack. Apprently it offers users nearly five times the performance and more than three times the energy efficiency of its predecessor, IBM’s POWER5+™ processor running upto a industry busting clock cycle of up to 5 GHz.

These Super-dense systems are starting to become a really interesting value prop. On Friday I got a link to the IBM.COM public website that included a video on our iDATAPLEX offering. It was there Saturday and has gone today, but it was there as this search in the current google index shows. The video doesn’t show any technical details but does give an interesting insight into this x86 based super-dense, Internet scale, behemoth of a server. I was hoping there was other public comment or blog entries I could leach off for discussion points, but the only search results return job postings 😉

Anyone go to the iDATAPLEX session at IMPACT 2008 and want to comment ??