IBM plans to reduce the size of the supercomputer Watson to the size of pizza boxes

A team of researchers at IBM currently working on a project of significant size reduction servers. In fact, it is a goal to reduce the size of such high-performance systems such as IBM Watson, to the size of a box of pizza.

This project is carried out simultaneously with the five-year project Dome, teamwork and IBM Institute for Radio Astronomy (Netherlands). The miniaturization of high-performance systems ideal for the task of creating the world's largest telescope Square Kilometer Array. Miniature performance of the server will process the data obtained with this telescope.

are already ready the first results of the project miniaturization: IBM managed to unite 128 computers - which funtsioniruyut as blades in a single server. The server performance is servers whose size in 4-10 times larger. Energy consumption at the same time is 55-60 watts, well below the energy performance of similar systems of similar size.

In the "packed" 1536 server processor cores that can operate with 3072 threads simultaneously. Testing of such a system was carried out with the software IBM DB2. The maximum amount of RAM in such a system can reach 6 TB, which can significantly increase the performance of applications that run in memory, for example, different DBMS. Among other things, the authors of the project are planning to use a miniature high-performance systems to solve different kinds of analytical tasks and work with cloud applications.

As early as next year, IBM plans to release a similar performance server power consumption in the 30-35 watts.

According to the head of the project, the main task of the project team at the moment - a significant reduction in power consumption of high-performance systems, as well as the size of such systems. Data centers consume megawatts of power, and a new project will help reduce electricity bills.

The size of the board of the new mini server is 133 * 55 mm. The authors of the project argue that the system performed similar performance on the boards size 305 * 245 mm. In the new servers installed 12-core processor T4240 architecture PowerPC.

IBM plans to further reduce the size of the servers by integrating various units, including the computer unit, system logic, memory controllers and block storage. This integration and reducing the size of the board are important to reduce power consumption. This is because now around 98% of the energy spent to transmit data from point A to point B at the level of the CPU and motherboard. The data come from block to block, pass through a number of channels. The smaller the board and blocks - the lower the energy costs will be in the system performance.

Source: habrahabr.ru/company/ibm/blog/230173/