IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet
We'll hand it to IBM's researchers. They think big - really big. Like
holy-crap-what-have-you-done big.
The Register has unearthed a research paper that shows IBM working on
a computing system capable "of hosting the entire internet as an
application." This mega system relies on a re-tooled version of IBM's
Blue Gene supercomputers so loved by the high performance computing
crowd. IBM's researchers have proposed tweaking the Blue Gene systems
to run today's most popular web applications such as Linux, Apache,
MySQL and Ruby on Rails.
The IBM paper rightly points out that both large SMP (symmetric
multi-processing) systems and clusters have their merits for massive
computing tasks. Of late, however, most organizations looking to
crunch through really big jobs have preferred clusters, which provide
certain economic advantages. Customers can buy lots of general purpose
hardware and networking components at a low cost and cobble the
systems together to equal or surpass the performance of gigantic SMPs.
Sun Microsystems, Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft stand as just some
of the companies using these clusters to offer software, processing
power and storage to other businesses. Their customers tap into these
larger systems and can "grow" their applications as needed by firing
up more and more of the provided computing infrastructure. Read More>>
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