Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!

to be displayed in the Framebuffer at startup...

It'll be Redhat, 6 point something. They found a set of the CDs lying around so they decided to use that.

can you play quake on it?

why, does your machine display one for each processor ?

weird....

In other news, the oil companies rejoyce as they plan the new power plant that this number of processors will require.

The Blue Gene will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory.

The first server that is immune to slashdotting!

It seems to be the ideal system to run the next Microsoft operating system.

To quote someone else: "16 trillion bytes should be enough for everyone."

What's the official benchmark of this thing, on a well known scale like QFPS (Quake Frames Per Second)...? :)

... id Software finally found a proper testing environment for Doom 3!

I love this line in the story:

The IBM research team is currently running a large Linux cluster to simulate Blue Gene.

Building a computer, to tell you how to build another, larger, more complex computer. Hrmmm..

It is official - Netcraft has confirmed: AIX is dying

One more crippling
bombshell hit the already beleaguered AIX community when IDC confirmed that AIX
market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of
all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states
that AIX has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've
known all along. AIX is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by
failing dead last [samag.com]
in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to
be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict AIX's
future. The hand writing is on the wall: AIX faces a bleak future. In fact there won't
be any future at all for AIX because AIX is dying. Things are looking very
bad for AIX. As many of us are already aware, AIX continues to lose market share. Red
ink flows like a river of blood.

AIX 5L is the most endangered of them all, having
lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time
AIX 5L developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point
more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: AIX 5L is dying.

Let's
keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

AIX Version 4.3.3 leader Theo states that there
are 7000 users of AIX Version 4.3.3. How many users of AIX Version 4.0 are there? Let's see. The number of
AIX Version 4.3.3 versus AIX Version 4.0 posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are
about 7000/5 = 1400 AIX Version 4.0 users. AIX posts on Usenet are about half of the volume
of AIX Version 4.0 posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of AIX. A recent article put
AIX Version 4.3.3 at about 80 percent of the AIX market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 =
36400 AIX Version 4.3.3 users. This is consistent with the number of AIX Version 4.3.3 Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, AIX went out
of business and was taken over by IBM who sell another troubled OS. Now IBM is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major
surveys show that AIX has steadily declined in market share. AIX is very sick and
its long term survival prospects are very dim. If AIX is to survive at all it will
be among OS dilettante dabblers. AIX continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle
could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, AIX is dead.

Fact: AIX is dying

The Blue Gene will contain 65,000 processors

But what they don't tell you it that it is 65,000 old 386DXs ... :)

You mean IBM, a large multinational company, isn't just out to do good? They actually use the best tools out there to make a profit without considering their moral obligation to stubbornly pick an OS and stick with it in religious conviction? Oh the horror! Won't someone please think of the children!

-1, Sarcastic asshole, I know I know...

i speak of none but the computer which will become after this one...

65k? That more linux CPUs than on all desktops. Now if only the average Joe and Mary could use it.

wait until the mice (actually hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings) start building earth.. now that will be a computer.. including nuke tests and weather!

That's why nothing will get done for the first month. The entire development team will be spending sleepless nights porting quake to work with 65000 processors.

Global Thermonuclear XBill

And it still won't render more than 100 FPS on Unreal Tournament. Ah well...

you don't need a computer for this, just skip your pickup line "Do you read slashdot?" :)

Wise of them to use PPC chips, which run rather cool.

Picture 65,000 AMD's at 2+ GHz, what a fire hazard that would be :*)

The Blue Gene will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory.

That's a LOT of processors.

It's nice to see that some companies have kept the tradition of computers that fill a room or five. Maybe they can throw some vacuum tubes on for old time's sake.

They want open-source to get them rich, right? Less initial cost by the company, etc etc. What are the odds they'll profit-share with people they're getting rich off of? (well, ok, attempting)

Hey, you're giving free content to Slashdot by posting here! OSDN are getting rich off you, and they're not profit-sharing! You'd better stop posting to Slashdot!!

Blue Gene
Buel Gane
Biel Ganes
Bill Gates

hah

Last I checked, Nuclear weapons did a pretty good job of folding MY proteins! ouch!

Building a computer, to tell you how to build another, larger, more complex computer. Hrmmm..

Uh, that's how it works in general. Or did you think modern CPUs were laid out by hand?

Naturally I laid out my own CPU by hand. I run Gentoo [gentoo.org] on it too. We all do. What are you, some kind of Mandrake wussy?

...it can't beat itself at chess.

We'll be finally able to work on that tetris [slashdot.org] problem!

They want open-source to get them rich, right? Less initial cost by the company, etc etc. What are the odds they'll profit-share with people they're getting rich off of? (well, ok, attempting)

Dude, why are you bitching? I am sure they will make the source available so you can install it on your own 65,000 processor machine.

Maybe because "Mean Green Earth-Annihilation Machine" would be a PR disaster? At least the the consensus about genomics is that it's generally a good thing...

See, we use this not only to simulate the weapons but also to simulate the actual attacks. Then our computer and the enemy computer can link up and calculate the damage. And if you live in a city that was eNuked, you would go to the molecular deconstruction booths. The we wouldn't have a nuclear winter, which would suck. The when Kirk shows up, we grab him and duct tape his freaking mouth shut, and we won't let Spock get behind us to pinch our shoulders. This could work.

Maybe they are profit sharing.

Let x = OSDN's profit
Let y = number of /. readers providing content

x/y = 0

To: Linus Torvalds
From: bob@ibm.com
Subject: kernel-smp patch, 65000 cpu's

Dear Linus,
Please accept this patch to accommodate thousands of processors in a single machine.
[attached: patch]

To: bob@ibm.com
From: Linus Torvalds
Subject: Re: kernel-smp patch, 65000 cpu's

No problem, Bob. Just go ahead and send me one of those machines for "testing" and then I'll merge the patch in...

Linus

Overall, the different flavours of Linux are much more compatible than Win9x and WinNT.

That's rich, and you're screaming "FUD". *cackle*.