IBM Opens Supercomputer Utility in Europe

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has opened the first of its so-called supercomputing on-demand utilities in Europe, after operating one in the United States for little more than a year. The facility, in Montpelier, France, is one of IBM's biggest centers of computing for its partners and customers. The center is gridded to the supercomputer utility that Big Blue set up in its Poughkeepsie, New York, data center in January 2003, so in a sense, the Montpelier center is an extensions of the Pokie center.

Since the point of grid computing is that workloads can be shared by machines regardless of their geography, it is not a coincidence that the two machines will have customers who think they are computing locally but may be doing it globally.

Indeed, IBM's first customer for the Montpelier center is actually a U.S.-based electronic design automation software maker Mentor Graphics, which is already a customer of the Pokie supercomputing utility and can now reach across the Atlantic to make use of the computing capacity in the Montpelier center, thanks to very fast networking and grid software.

Mentor Graphics seems to be the beta test for this approach, since IBM says that it will eventually offer simultaneous processing across the two centers to commercial customers using the Globus toolkit and a fast network connection. The two centers are currently linked through IBM's private network, but it is installing an OC3 link between the two centers. Customers who sign up to use either center can establish secure, virtual private network links between their users and the utilities, with up to 100 MB/sec of bandwidth.

The Poughkeepsie supercomputing utility has more than 2,300 servers, including pSeries 655 and pSeries 690 AIX Unix servers, various Intel-based xSeries servers running Linux and Windows, and Advanced Micro Devices Opteron-based eServer 325 servers running Linux. About a year ago, IBM started adding its BladeCenter blade servers to the mix, since these machines are denser and easier to manage and cluster than rack-mounted xSeries machines.

The Montpelier center has a similar mix of iron, but less of it to start. Mentor Graphics plans to run jobs (basically benchmarking the performance of its software, which is a massively parallel supercomputer application that is used by chip makers to design chips) on big pSeries 690 servers in France that are linked to xSeries Linux clusters in the United States.