PERCS

IBM PERCS
Industry	Supercomputing, High-performance computing
Founded	July 12, 2011; 15 years ago
Products	Power 775 supercomputer
Parent	IBM

PERCS (an acronym for Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System) represents IBM's solution to the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program. This initiative culminated in the commercial launch of the Power 775, a supercomputer distinguished by its exceptional fabric and memory bandwidth capabilities, compact processing density, and energy-conscious design.

IBM unveiled the Power 775 on July 12, 2011, with deliveries commencing the following month.

Background

The HPCS initiative was structured as a three-stage research and development program. IBM, together with Cray and Sun Microsystems, received funding for Phase II. Collaborating with a consortium of 12 academic institutions and the Los Alamos National Lab, IBM focused on creating flexible computing platforms emphasizing innovations in chip design, system architecture, operating systems, compilers, and programming environments aimed at commercial deployment.

In November 2006, IBM was awarded Phase III funding amounting to $244 million to further develop PERCS technologies and produce prototype systems by 2010.

Deployment

Initially, the PERCS-based supercomputer was planned for use in the Blue Waters project; however, due to its high expense and complexity, IBM’s engagement was terminated. The system was eventually delivered by Cray Inc., who implemented a hybrid CPU-GPU architecture with reduced global bandwidth.

Since then, Power775/PERCS systems have been installed at around twenty-four facilities worldwide, ranging from configurations with 2,000 up to more than 64,000 Power7 cores. These installations primarily support applications requiring intensive network and memory resources such as weather forecasting and climate simulations (including organizations like ECMWF, UKMO, Environment Canada, and the Japan Meteorological Agency) as well as scientific investigations conducted by universities and government research centers.

Technology

PERCS incorporates IBM’s cutting-edge advancements derived from its server and supercomputing portfolios, including the POWER7 processor, the AIX operating system, the X10 language, and the General Parallel File System.

Power 775

Also referred to as POWER7-IH or P7-IH, the Power 775 is the commercial offshoot of PERCS within the IBM Power Systems family. Released in 2011 following IBM’s withdrawal from the University of Illinois’ Blue Waters petaflops initiative, IBM positioned the Power 775 to leverage expansion opportunities in high-performance computing markets.

Contrary to IBM’s Blue Gene line which utilizes low-power processors to manage thermal density, the Power 775 employs water-cooled rack modules measuring 34 inches wide by 54 inches deep and standing 3.5 inches tall (2U).

Each drawer houses eight cache-coherent nodes capable of running multiple OS images. Within each drawer is a multi-chip module (MCM) composed of four POWER7 CPUs alongside sixteen DDR3 SDRAM slots per MCM. This configuration yields up to 256 POWER7 cores and a maximum of 2 TB RAM per drawer. Connectivity within a drawer is facilitated by eight optical connect controller hub chips that interlink MCMs, PCIe peripherals, and compute nodes through a dragonfly network topology. A single rack can accommodate up to twelve Power 775 drawers delivering peak performance of up to 96 TFLOPS.

The architecture supports memory capacities reaching 24 terabytes and storage up to 230 terabytes per rack while achieving computational throughput exceeding 94 teraflops per rack.

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