Rice University, IBM Partner to Bring First Blue Gene Supercomputer to Texas

University of Sao Paulo signs on as first user for Rice University's newest supercomputer

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HOUSTON - 30 Mar 2012: Rice University and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a partnership to build the first award-winning IBM Blue Gene supercomputer in Texas. Rice also announced a related collaboration agreement with the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in Brazil to initiate the shared administration and use of the Blue Gene supercomputer, which allows both institutions to share the benefits of the new computing resource.

Rice faculty will use the Blue Gene to further their own research and to collaborate with academic and industry partners on a broad range of science and engineering questions related to energy, geophysics, basic life sciences, cancer research, personalized medicine and more.

The collaborative agreement securing Brazil's share of time on Rice's Blue Gene was signed in Sao Paulo March 27 by a delegation that included Rice President David Leebron and USP President Joao Grandino Rodas. Leebron is traveling with a delegation led by Houston Mayor Annise Parker. The delegation includes Rice Provost George McLendon, Greater Houston Partnership (GHP) President and CEO Jeff Moseley and other GHP members.

"Collaboration and partnership have a unique place in Rice's history as a pre-eminent research university, and it is fitting that Rice begins its second century with two innovative partnerships that highlight the university's commitments to expanding our international reach, strengthening our research and building stronger ties with our home city," Leebron said.

USP is Brazil's largest institution of higher education and research, and Rodas said the agreement represents an important bond between Rice and USP. "The joint utilization of the supercomputer by Rice University and USP, much more than a simple sharing of high-tech equipment, means the strength of an effective partnership between both universities," he said.

Mayor Parker, a 1978 Rice alumna, said, "When I was at Rice, it looked inward. Today it looks outward through this agreement. It strengthens not only Rice University but also the city of Houston."

Rice's new Blue Gene supercomputer, which has yet to be named, is slated to become operational in May. It is based on IBM's POWER processor technology, which was developed in part at the company's Austin, Texas labs. Rice and IBM shared the cost of the system.

"High-performance computers like the IBM Blue Gene/P are critical in virtually every discipline of science and engineering, and we are grateful for IBM's help in bringing this resource to Rice," McLendon said. "For individual faculty, the supercomputer will open the door to new areas of research. The Blue Gene also opens doors for Rice as the university seeks to establish institutional relationships both in our home city and with critical international partners like USP."

Unlike the typical desktop or laptop computer, which have a single microprocessor, supercomputers typically contain thousands of processors. This makes them ideal for scientists who study complex problems, because jobs can be divided among all the processors and run in a matter of seconds rather than weeks or months. Supercomputers are used to simulate things that cannot be reproduced in a laboratory -- like Earth's climate or the collision of galaxies -- and to examine vast databases like those used to map underground oil reservoirs or to develop personalized medical treatments.

USP officials said they expect their faculty to use the supercomputer for research ranging from astronomy and weather prediction to particle physics and biotechnology.

"This significant investment by IBM is the result of a long-standing collaborative initiative with Rice where together we have developed a unique and substantial computational resource for the research community in Houston, across the country and around the world," said Tony Befi, IBM senior state executive for Texas. "This new computing capability will speed the search for new sources of energy, new ways of maximizing current energy sources, new cancer drugs and new routes to personalized medicine. So we're excited that Rice has now joined an exclusive club of the world's top research organizations who use powerful and energy-efficient Blue Gene supercomputers to solve some of the world's most pressing problems."

In 2009, President Obama recognized IBM and its Blue Gene family of supercomputers with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the most prestigious award in the United States given to leading innovators for technological achievement.

Including the Blue Gene/P, Rice has partnered with IBM to launch three new supercomputers during the past two years that have more than quadrupled Rice's high-performance computing capabilities. The addition of the Blue Gene/P doubles the number of supercomputing CPU hours that Rice can offer. The six-rack system contains nearly 25,000 processor cores that are capable of conducting about 84 trillion mathematical computations each second. When fully operational, the system is expected to rank among the world's 300 fastest supercomputers as measured by the TOP500 supercomputer rankings.

A image is available for download at:  http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/0330_BLUEGENE.jpg

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is known for its "unconventional wisdom." With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for "best value" among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. To read "What they're saying about Rice," go to www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.

News Release from IBM - Holey Optochip

Made in IBM Labs: Holey Optochip First to Transfer One Trillion Bits of Information per Second Using the Power of Light

• Researchers invent novel technique by fabricating tiny holes in a single quarter-inch chip to boost data transfer rates
• Until now, it was not possible to transport terabits of data for existing parallel optical communications technology
• New prototype compactly and efficiently delivers ultra-high interconnect bandwidth to power future supercomputer and data center applications

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LOS ANGELES - 08 Mar 2012: IBM (NYSE: IBM) scientists today will report on a prototype optical chipset, dubbed “Holey Optochip”, that is the first parallel optical transceiver to transfer one trillion bits – one terabit – of information per second, the equivalent of downloading 500 high definition movies. The report will be presented at the Optical Fiber Communication Conferencetaking place in Los Angeles.

With the ability to move information at blazing speeds – eight times faster than parallel optical components available today – the breakthrough could transform how data is accessed, shared and used for a new era of communications, computing and entertainment. The raw speed of one transceiver is equivalent to the bandwidth consumed by 100,000 users at today’s typical 10 Mb/s high-speed internet access. Or, it would take just around an hour to transfer the entire U.S. Library of Congress web archive through the transceiver.  

Progress in optical communications is being driven by an explosion of new applications and services as the amount of data being created and transmitted over corporate and consumer networks continues to grow. At one terabit per second, IBM’s latest advance in optical chip technology provides unprecedented amounts of bandwidth that could one day ship loads of data such as posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos posted online, sensors used to gather climate information, and transaction records of online purchases.  

“Reaching the one trillion bit per second mark with the Holey Optochip marks IBM’s latest milestone to develop chip-scale transceivers that can handle the volume of traffic in the era of big data,” said IBM Researcher Clint Schow, part of the team that built the prototype. “We have been actively pursuing higher levels of integration, power efficiency and performance for all the optical components through packaging and circuit innovations. We aim to improve on the technology for commercialization in the next decade with the collaboration of manufacturing partners.”  

Optical networking offers the potential to significantly improve data transfer rates by speeding the flow of data using light pulses, instead of sending electrons over wires. Because of this, researchers have been looking for ways to make use of optical signals within standard low-cost, high-volume chip manufacturing techniques for widespread use. 

Photomicrograph of IBM Holey Optochip. Original chip dimensions are 5.2 mm x 5 .8 mm.

Using a novel approach, scientists in IBM labs developed the Holey Optochip by fabricating 48 holes through a standard silicon CMOS chip. The holes allow optical access through the back of the chip to 24 receiver and 24 transmitter channels to produce an ultra-compact, high-performing and power-efficient optical module capable of record setting data transfer rates. 

The compactness and capacity of optical communication has become indispensable in the design of large data-handling systems. With that in mind, the Holey Optochip module is constructed with components that are commercially available today, providing the possibility to manufacture at economies of scale. 

Consistent with green computing initiatives, the Holey Optochip achieves record speed at a power efficiency (the amount of power required to transmit a bit of information) that is among the best ever reported. The transceiver consumes less than five watts; the power consumed by a 100W light bulb could power 20 transceivers. This progress in power efficient interconnects is necessary to allow companies who adopt high-performance computing to manage their energy load while performing powerful applications such as analytics, data modeling and forecasting. 

By demonstrating unparalleled levels of performance, the Holey Optochip illustrates that high-speed, low-power interconnects are feasible in the near term and optical is the only transmission medium that can stay ahead of the accelerating global demand for broadband. The future of computing will rely heavily on optical chip technology to facilitate the growth of big data and cloud computing and the drive for next-generation data center applications.

Technical Aspects of the Holey Optochip

Photomicrograph of the back of the IBM Holey Optochip with lasers and photodectors visible through substrate holes.  

Parallel optics is a fiber optic technology primarily targeted for high-data, short-reach multimode fiber systems that are typically less than 150 meters. Parallel optics differs from traditional duplex fiber optic serial communication in that data is simultaneously transmitted and received over multiple optical fibers. 

A single 90-nanometer IBM CMOS transceiver IC with 24 receiver and 24 transmitter circuits becomes a Holey Optochip with the fabrication of forty-eight through-silicon holes, or “optical vias” – one for each transmitter and receiver channel. Simple post-processing on completed CMOS wafers with all devices and standard wiring levels results in an entire wafer populated with Holey Optochips. The transceiver chip measures only 5.2 mm x 5.8 mm. Twenty-four channel, industry-standard 850-nm VCSEL (vertical cavity surface emitting laser) and photodiode arrays are directly flip-chip soldered to the Optochip. This direct packaging produces high-performance, chip-scale optical engines. The Holey Optochips are designed for direct coupling to a standard 48-channel multimode fiber array through an efficient microlens optical system that can be assembled with conventional high-volume packaging tools. 

Other Highlights at the OFC Conference 

Also at the OFC Conference, IBM researchers are presenting the following advances: 

• Two optical links that are the most power efficient ever reported. Underpinned by a novel receiver design, a complete single-channel VCSEL based link achieved 15Gb/s operation while consuming only 20 miliwatts of power. This represents the first practical demonstration of an optical interconnect that attains the efficiency levels that will be required for exascale computers circa 2020.
• A complete single-channel 40 Gb/s VCSEL-based optical link that not only sets a new benchmark for speed, but also operates at this high data rate with significant margin. Transmitter pre-distortion for end-to-end link performance improvement, an equalization technique that IBM has pioneered, enabled this breakthrough. 

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