IBM: Let’s Get Small

By Doug Barney

In our last newsletter we told you about three universities in Germany, England, and Italy working on nano-wire techniques to build ultra small palm-size supercomputers.

More recently Armonk-based IBM (www.ibm.com)  announced its approach: connecting thousands of tiny processors to form one laptop-size supercomputer.
By not promising something that fits in your grubby mitt, IBM is perhaps just being a bit more realistic. After all, Big Blue has no shortage of experience and has the supercomputing records to prove it.

The IBM breakthrough isn’t the number of processors, or their size, but the way they interconnect. In this case, the processors are connected by light, meaning they can be so close together that thousands of processors can fit in a single chip. It also means these processors can be densely packed without the whole darn thing catching fire.

Another area that Big Blue cares deeply about is green computing. And that is one reason why it wants to shrink supercomputers –  because they’ll use a fraction of the electricity of a conventional machine.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22769.wss