In an IBM announcement earlier this week about the IBM Linux Wrist Watch project, IBM made a strong point about their growing use of Linux in projects ranging from the tiny Linux Wrist Watch, all the way up to a “petaflop super computer”

What's a petaflop? How do you make a petaflop super computer?

Alex Morrow, “IBM Fellow” at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and project leader of the IBM Linux Wrist Watch project shed some light on those questions in an interview with LinuxDevices.com's Rick Lehrbaum . . .

Morrow: We think [the Linux Wrist Watch] is a breakthrough in Linux, getting Linux down into this size device. It's a good example of what we're trying to do, which is to see how broadly we can use Linux, and to demonstrate our commitment to having open platforms. Did you see the news about [Linux] going up into the Blue Gene computer, with Linux?

RL: You're referring to IBM's recent statement about extending Linux “from wrist watches to petaflop super computers”? Yes, I saw that. But please tell me, what's a “petaflop”?

Morrow: It's one quadrillion operations per second. The system will consist of a million processors running simultaneously. It will be used to simulate protein folding at the molecular level. Basically, it's a huge [computing] device, with a million parallel processors, solving this particular problem in genetics.

RL: Do you actually have a million processors running right now?

Morrow: They will, by the time they're done. But that's absolutely what they're building.

In checking the Blue Gene website, there did not appear to be any explicit reference to the use of Linux on that project. Lehrbaum therefore asked IBM to comment on the possible use of Linux in the million-processor application. That inquiry resulted in the following response from Ambuj Goyal, vice president of IBM Research:

“We're considering using Linux for the Blue Gene supercomputer.
We will experiment with that possibility.”

Think about it: a million microprocessors all running Linux in a single system, executing a single coordinated program — to crack a mystery of nature!

 
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