Sentilla Blog

A lot of green announcements have come down the wire this week, from IBM's "smart everything" to Cisco "EnergyWise" to Google's PowerMeter. With a number of emails questioning how the Google system works, I thought I'd explain it a bit.

First, a bit of background. Google.org is Google's philanthropic arm, focusing on innovations to make people's lives better. Energy reduction falls into this category; Google.org has invested in and supported numerous renewable energy initiatives and has funded Google's solar installation at their campus in Mountain View.

Warning: This post has all kinds of unconfirmed rumors, but is indicative of where the future of high performance computing is going, at least according to IBM.

I had the pleasure of getting to see the Blue Gene installation at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center, which gives us a glimpse at the future of High Performance Computing (HPC).  While IBM's webpage about Blue Gene is a bit out of date, it gives you a glimpse into what's running there.  Installed in 2005, it has been upgraded a number of times since then with new HPC technology.  Wikipedia has some more technical insight into the evolution of Blue Gene.

One of the things about Blue Gene is how much power it consumes, how much computing power is packed into a small space, and how it is cooled.  The current Blue Gene models (the big black row boxes with a slant) make up the majority of the Blue Gene data center.  This new "Blue Gene/P configuration" hosts 4096 processors per rack.  The rack uses contained cooling with water-filled radiators cooling the hot air exhaust.  The entire system fits in the alien-pod-shaped row container.

I wrote earlier about IBM's high density Blue Gene/P data center that is a state of the art HPC system fitting tons of computing power into a small space.  It pushes the envelope in a number of ways, including how to keep it cool, and how to provide enough power at such high density.

This weekend, the New York Times Magazine profiled Watson, the system running on the Blue Gene/P cluster at the T.J. Watson Research Center in order to take on humans at Jeopardy!  The article is lengthy, but the video is equally entertaining.

IBM has their own website too that explains Watson.