Bruce Upbin

Bruce Upbin, Forbes Staff

I manage our technology coverage.

12/08/2008 @ 12:00PM

IBM's Infinite Research Problem

Blue Gene Watson can calculate 91 trillion operations a second and works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That means in a mere 20 days the IBM supercomputer has crunched enough data to model one microsecond’s behavior of a folding protein in the eye while gulping in enough energy to power 500 homes.

Lousy economy aside, power is the scourge of the IT industry. IBM helped create the problem by pushing the boundaries of computation; now IBM Research is trying to solve it, too, by going to the sub-molecular scale to root out the waste in every computer.

Blue Gene Watson takes up a truck-sized room at the southern end of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. (See “Metadata: Speaking Of IBM.”) When it was built three years ago, Blue Gene Watson was the fastest supercomputer in the world; now it’s the 25th fastest (so it goes). Researchers use it to simulate protein models which might lead to medicine that’s vastly safer, more powerful and targeted.

But it’s a hungry machine: Shawn Hall, a towering IBM research scientist, has to shout over the noise of the 120 kilowatt blower to explain the workings of a new recirculating water conditioner, a steampunk set of copper pipes and valves he built from scratch to bring pre-chilled coolant above the dew point so that Watson’s computer towers don’t get soaked in condensate.

That’s just a beginning. IBMers are now talking about building “exaflop” systems, which go beyond one quintillion calculations per second. “The scary part is being able to say, ‘We can do this,”’ says Mark Dean, IBM Research strategy chief and one of the inventors of the IBM PC. But it won’t be in the next year or in five years, adds Dean. “Let’s just say we’ll all be around when it happens.”

The problem then will be building the computer without needing a nuclear reactor to power it. IBM’s Roadrunner, the fastest supercomputer in the world, used to simulate mushroom clouds by Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico, was the first to break the petaflop barrier, at 1 trillion computations per second. It eats 2.5 megawatts of power. And that’s nothing compared with the giant data centers being built around the world by the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard , Google , Yahoo! and Microsoft . The biggest of these consumes 250 megawatts.

At the other end of the Watson center’s 1,090-foot arc of a building is the cluttered office of Yurii Vlasov, a Russian physicist IBM hired two years ago. Vlasov, an expert in nanophotonics, hopes to greatly reduce computers’ power consumption by replacing the electrons racing around each chip with light.

Why? Because 40% to 60% of a chip’s energy consumption is allocated for the brute task of piping electrons through a chip’s input-output wires.

Copper wire, the current conductor of choice on a chip, is relatively fast, but not nearly as fast and energy-efficient as light. Electrons race across copper in the best systems at two to five gigabits of data per second; photons “imprinted” on a laser beam can move at five times that rate.

By opening up the bottleneck within the chip and at its edge, you end up with far cooler-running chips. This is why the computer industry has replaced copper with fiber wherever it could–first between racks of servers, then within a rack of servers and now between individual chips.

IBM and others, such as Intel and start-ups Lightwire and Luxtera have been working out ways to substitute light for electrons. The problem? The copper wires they’d like to replace are just 35 nanometers thick in the most advanced chips (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). At those almost unimaginable densities, it’s a challenge to design reliable pathways for flickering light.

In March, Vlasov and his colleagues announced they had successfully created a photonic silicon switch so small that 2,000 of them take up just one square millimeter of space. This grid could be integrated onto a chip itself, shuttling data between processing cores and a dense layer of memory stacked on top.

Data could theoretically be moved through this process at 100 times the speed using one-tenth the power. IBM’s optical components stood up to the crucial test of the wild fluctuations in temperature that occur regularly on the surface of today’s dense processing cores.

This optical work, they hope, will keep Moore’s Law going another decade and let IBM produce ever bigger supercomputers without global warming-induced pangs of guilt.

When such nanoscale optics become commercial, it could provide a bigger boost for global productivity than the undersea fiber cables laid in the 1990s telecom boom–based on the sheer volume of data it will channel.

“By 2015,” predicts Vlasov, “there will be more optical links in one high-performance data center than in all telecommunications links worldwide.”

See Also:

Ride The Light

IBM’s Chief Isn’t Blue

IBM’s Webbie World

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