IBM Offers Pay-As-You-Go Access To Blue Gene Supercomputer
By Paul McDougall. InformationWeek
What is a supercomputer? Link to webopedia.com
For the first time, IBM says it will give business customers online access to its powerful
Blue Gene supercomputer on a pay-as-you-go basis.
IBM customers will be able to tap into up to 5.7 teraflops--or 5.7 trillion computing
operations per second--of computing power on a Blue Gene system residing in
Rochester, N.Y., through a secure VPN, the company says.
To date, only the most compute-intensive industries, such as life sciences and
engineering, have been able to justify the cost of purchasing a supercomputer--a fact
that has relegated the market for such systems to niche status.
Blue Gene computers start at more than $1 million for the most basic configuration.
Now IBM officials hope to extend the market by offering access to Blue Gene on an
"on-demand" basis.
There are a lot of industries where it doesn't make sense to buy a supercomputer, but
where you could make good use of that power on an occasional basis. The program
could make supercomputing more appealing to mainstream businesses such as financial
services and manufacturing.
IBM will charge between 50 and 90 cents per megaflop of computing power consumed.
A megaflop is 1 million computing operations per second. The program will bring IBM
additional revenue from its supercomputing group without cutting into existing sales.
Beyond larger, mainstream businesses, smaller high-tech companies might also use the
program to access supercomputing power without having to pay up front for a system.
One such company that has already signed on is QuantumBio Inc., a small research
company that develops and tests new drugs for pharmaceutical manufacturers.
QuantumBio CEO Kevin Harter says he thinks access to Blue Gene will help the
company win more customers and grow faster. Not having a supercomputer "has kept
us out of some business," Harter says.
IBM is working with a number of software application developers to help enable their
programs to run remotely on Blue Gene. Novell SuSE, LSTC, and Allinea are among
the developers IBM has tapped for the program.