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IBM Sharpens the eServer BladeCenter with another Blade IBM has introduced the BladeCenter JS20, joining the
BladeCenter HS20, a high-performance Intel Xeon blade, as the current blades
offered for the eServer BladeCenter. The JS20 blade, with a starting price of
$2,699.00, features a two-way POWER4-based SMP architecture utilizing the
PowerPC 970 1.6GHz processor, with SIMD for parallel processing enablement,
as well as: ▫
512KB
ECC L2 cache; ▫
512MB–4GB of ECC DDR SDRAM memory in 4 DIMM slots;
▫
Dual
1GB integrated Ethernet controllers; ▫
ATA-100
IDE controller for up to two 40GB IDE disk drives (second disk precludes
daughter card); ▫
Daughter
card slot for an optional Dual Gigabit Ethernet or Dual 2GB Fibre Channel adapter (if used, only one disk drive
position is available); ▫
Integrated
service processor; ▫
Light
Path Diagnostics. Also announced, Linux is the only 64-bit OS currently
supported for the BladeCenter JS20 and is available directly from SuSE Linux (Enterprise Server Version 8 Service Release
3) or from Turbolinux (Enterprise Server Version 8
with 64-bit kernel and 32- and 64-bit application support). In a statement of
direction, IBM announced AIX support on the BladeCenter JS20 in the third
quarter of 2004 and asserts that all of these operating environments will be
supported by IBM’s Director and Tivoli Management products in a common
management scheme (Q4 2004). IBM is positioning the JS20 as a 64-bit HPC
platform, featuring superior floating point performance, enhanced by the
additional SIMD instruction set, targeting: ▫
Linux
high performance clusters; ▫
Financial
services; ▫
Life
science/bioinformatics; ▫
Scientific/technical
computing in general. IBM also announced the eServer BladeCenter for
Bioinformatics, focusing on workload balancing, high throughput, and
application performance in life science research environments. Widely used
applications for sequence analysis, such as BLAST, FASTA, and HMMER, have
been ported, optimized, and pre-tested for the IBM eServer BladeCenter
JS20. The eServer BladeCenter, developed in partnership with
Intel, is a 7U, rack-mountable blade cage with capacity for fourteen blades.
In addition, it features hot-swap capabilities for all blades and for the
BladeCenter’s redundant power, networking, and management modules. The
BladeCenter’s service processor interacts with the “on-blade” service
capabilities for blade configuration and active monitoring, as well as with
the optional IBM Director V4.1 systems management software (available Q1 2004).
Net/Net The ultra-dense blade server architecture that was
initially focused on lowering power and heat is now, because of the
industry’s emerging “utility” computing models, a potentially critical
component to that computing model’s notions of virtualization and of
scale-out computing. While HP, Sun, and Dell, as well as a number of boutique
blade vendors, all have blade servers and rack cages in which to deploy them,
we find IBM’s story a bit more fine-grained and credible in their
“systems-centric” approach than the blade-centric stories coming from the
competition. IBM’s approach perhaps reflects their “big iron” highly-managed,
virtualized systems understanding, being brought “downstream” to its smaller
systems. IBM has been positioning their Intel XEON-based HS20 as
the high performance blade for business-critical applications on Windows and
32-bit Linux and the eServer BladeCenter as a powerful and flexible
“standard” chassis that incorporates blades, storage, switches, whatever,
into the ultra-dense computing model. Now with the JS20, IBM adds POWER to
this computing model, which lends itself well to the “scale-out to scale-up”
needs of the HPC community. For example, a single 19", 42U rack, fully
decked out, delivers more than one TFLOP of performance supporting any
combination of Xenon and Power CPUs to support any mix of computing needs.
For those aware of the IBM Blue Gene Supercomputer Project, we believe that
system’s radically different type of computer architecture called SMASH
(simple, multiple, and self-healing) is a computing vision conceptually
compatible with what we are seeing develop in the dramatically smaller scale
of the eServer BladeCenter. Again, IBM’s computing insight and understanding
conceptually impact their smaller systems efforts. In sum, we believe that BladeCenter JS20 brings a proven, industry standard 64-bit processor, POWER4, into the very successful blades domain of Intel or Intel-compatible blades. In delivering such a highly managed, highly redundant, highly integrated SMP/Cluster capable, rackable chassis for the HPC community, IBM is setting the mark for Linux/Windows blade clusters today and perhaps the standard for computing component interconnect and integration of the future. |