IBM uncloaks 20 petaflops BlueGene/Q super

Although everybody seems to be excited about GPU-goosed supercomputing these days, Big Blue is sticking to its Power-based, many-cored BlueGene and Blue Waters massively parallel supers, and revving them up to bust into the 20-petaflops zone. The Blue Waters massively parallel Power7-based supercomputer and its funky switching …

[Steve Davies 3]

teraflops or petaflops? Which one is it?

The title mentions petaflops. The text mentions 20 teraflops and 20 petaflops. Are these the same unit or is one 1000 times as big as the other?

Come on El-Reg, we need to know which one it is.

[Jefe Mixtli]

Blue gunk

"The compute node is not fully populated with its DDR3 main memory, which is why some of it has blue gunk on it, which is covering the sockets where memory will be plugged in."

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From the picture, it's obvious that the 'blue gunk' is thermal grease of some sort. It doesn't appear to covering empty sockets, but is smeared on top of DDR3 chips in-place. You can easily see the blue gunk on some of the chips on the left side of the node.

[John 62]

Linux processors

I'm assuming the Linux processors aren't dedicated solely to running the OS, as > 50% of the processors seems like a lot, just for the OS.

[Chemist]

Re : Linux processors

"1.57 million cores dedicated to processing calculations, with another 98,304 cores for running the Linux kernel..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonky

Why draw a nice box on the PCB where the processor goes and then mount the processor wonky? In my day, techies were anal retentive enough to avoid this sort of shoddy slap-dash nonsense. It just goes to prove that encouraging them to socialise and become normal people was a mistake and they should be thrown back in the basement with their pizza and buzz cola immediately.

Seriously, anything costing over a million dollars they should at least be able to get the components inside the lines! and don't get me started on using blu-tack to stick it together...

[Destroy All Monsters]

Super-Insertion Force Socket?

I would think that's the effect of the 100 pounds of force that the spring with the thermal sink brings to the target.

Tombstone because dead CPU.