IBM wants to make a difference

By Candice Jones for IBM
Johannesburg, 09 Oct 2008

IBM's donation of the $1.6 million supercomputer, Blue Gene/P, is in response to the growing innovation opportunities on the African continent.

While there is a business objective, IBM VP of systems research Mark Dean says: “Sub-Saharan Africa has many needs and we at IBM wanted to make a difference. Blue Gene will give the sub-continent an opportunity to grow.”

Dean was instrumental in the recent donation of the Blue Gene to the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), part of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's (CSIR's) Meraka Institute.

The machine was unveiled on Monday by deputy science and technology minister Derek Hanekom.

“The aim of the donation is to enable Sub-Saharan Africa to extend its knowledge, skills base and research in science and technology,” adds Dean.

African opportunity

Dean says the company already does billions of dollars' worth of work in the region and intends to grow its opportunities. Several needs for the sub-continent were identified by an innovation study conducted by IBM.

“The results of the study identified several key issues that we could participate in. The first being the donation of Blue Gene and the research possibilities it would enhance. The second is the mentorship of students in the sci-tech fields.”

Dean says the donation to the CSIR comes with the provision that it will be shared across the region. “The CHPC has the facilities to accommodate and operate the machine, and will provide the whole sub-continent access to its power.”

IBM is convinced it will be “a tool for the people”. Dean believes the time is now right for the donation to make an impact. With people across the globe interested in the economic growth opportunities that Africa represents, Dean says he hopes the computer will enable stronger growth.

On-board power

Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the series developed by IBM, is a 14 teraflop system. This gives it a capacity of more than six times of the other IBM system, the E1350, which was installed at the centre more than a year ago. This means the Blue Gene/P can perform 14 trillion floating-point calculations.

The computer has 1 024 nodes and each consists of four processors based in a variant of the PowerPC 450, making for a total of 4 096 processors in total.

While the local version will run at 14 teraflops, the capacity to grow the single rack machine hosted locally is available. Argonne National Laboratory runs a /P system, listed as the world's third fastest computer, running 163 840 cores.

Despite being one of two of the most powerful machines on the African continent, the CSIR's Blue Gene is unlikely to make the Top 500 list just yet. The lowest listed machine is a Fujitsu-Siemens supercomputer, running at 18.81 teraflops