IBM Bags System p5 Super Deals, But Is Power6 Slipping?

Published: February 1, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM's marketeers for its System p5 AIX and sometimes Linux line of servers have been unusually quiet so far in 2007, but they are beginning to awaken so as to not allow rival Sun Microsystems to garner all the headlines in the Unix racket. They might be keeping a low profile for a good reason, too, if the Power6 processor slips from a second half of 2007 to early 2008 delivery date, as one of these announcements seems to suggest.

While Linux and multi-core X64 servers are increasingly popular in the supercomputing arena, Big Blue nonetheless still sells a lot of System p5 iron to research labs and companies that want lots of number-crunching power. This week, IBM announced it had closed two such deals.

The deal concerns a pair of System p5 clusters, each comprised of 160 of the IBM's System p5 575 AIX servers, which has just been acquired by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the United States government that creates the weather models that are distributed through the National Weather Service. One machine will be the primary modeling box, while the other is a full-capacity backup of the primary machine. Both clusters use Power5+ processors running at 1.9 GHz, and will have more than four times the processing capacity of the existing boxes in use at NOAA's National Center for Environmental Prediction, which is based in Camp Spring, Maryland. The NOAA machines use the 16-core variant of the p5 575 (that's eight processor sockets per machine), and have a total of 2,368 processors and a sustained performance rating of just under 14 teraflops on the Linpack Fortran benchmark test.

The two servers will share a vault of IBM's DS4800 disk arrays, with a total of 160 terabytes of disk capacity, and will take in massive streams of data from a network of six satellites that were launched last year to study the jet stream and storm systems; the satellite network is called COSMIC, which is short for Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate. Including other data sources, the machine will be able to process the information from over 240 million atmospheric measurements on a daily basis to come up with the weather forecast.

Rather than buying the gear, NOAA has leased the equipment under a nine-year deal it inked with Big Blue back in 2002. The deal allows for regular upgrades of equipment, and was negotiated by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

These new NOAA System p5 boxes are almost the same as the pair of machines used in the United Kingdom's European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts, which is based in Reading, just west of London. ECMWF has a pair of p5 575 clusters, each with 2,240 of the same Power5+ processors and rated at 14 teraflops; the British weather forecasting service also has a 9.2 teraflops cluster based on older pSeries 690 servers equipped with 1.9 GHz Power4+ processors.

IBM also announced that the Max Planck Society, perhaps the most prestigious scientific organization in Germany and a regular Unix customer of IBM's, has commissioned IBM to make supercomputer based on its forthcoming Power6 family of machines, which are due in the second half of this year. This box will have 20 times the performance of the current System p5 575 cluster that the research institution has, which means well over 100 teraflops. Max Planck's current supercomputer is ranked 159 on the Top 500 supercomputer list, and has 688 processors and is rated at a sustained performance of 4.6 teraflops.

IBM expects to complete and install the Power6 machine in 2008 for Max Planck, which is awarding a "multi-million dollar contract" for the machine. IBM and Max Planck would not go into details about the configuration or its precise price. The cluster will be used for research into plasma physics.

The interesting bit in the Max Planck announcement is that IBM refers to Power6 as the next-generation processor that will be the engines in the next generation of "eServer systems planned for 2008." Only two months ago, IBM was saying that the dual-core Power6 processors were expected in the second half of 2007 and would be running in the range of 4 GHz to 5 GHz. The Power6 chips should yield a minimum of 2.5 times the performance per core compared to the Power5+ chip, and with microarchitecture improvements, bigger and better on-chip caches, larger and faster main memory, and other improvements, system performance could scale considerably higher. Still, it is probably only safe to assume that the Power6 machines will have twice the performance, just in case.

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