Potsdam Scientists to Tackle New Type of Weather Simulations with IBM iDataPlex

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)'s new iDataPlex computer was put into operation in January and offers 30 teraflops of processing power as described below.

Potsdam Scientists to Tackle New Type of Weather Simulations with IBM iDataPlex

One of the key reasons that iDataPlex stands apart from other high-performance computer platforms is its energy efficiency, approximately 230 megaflops of performance per watt estimated.

Part of IBM’s “Big Green” initiative, iDataPlex maximizes performance per watt with innovative cooling techniques such as a rear-door heat exchanger.

Although IBM iDataPlex should be known much more as one of smarter commodity-based clusters, we have not met a good explanation so often (only in Japan?).

I just happened to meet an chatty and interesting article about iDataPlex by Linux Magazine’s HPC editor, Douglas Eadline.

Doug Meets The iDataPlex

He visited Dave Weber, the program director of the Wall Street Center of Excellence, Worldwide Client Centers for IBM, and held a dialogue with Dave about iDataPlex.

First things first, he knew iDataPlex meant "Large Scale Internet Data Center" and he hoped he was not in the wrong meeting because he was an HPC guy. However during the meeting, he found "this was obviously not your typical 1U server node. Indeed, it was almost like someone ask a group of HPC users to design a node.", and continued his finding about low powered fans, cabling, smarter combination of commodities, energy efficiency, cost performance and TCO, and so on.

Finally Doug commented:
Instead of calling it the “iDataPlex for Web 2.0″, they should have just called it the “iDataPlex for HPC 2.0!

Doug's message can be shared with me very well, and IBM should talk iDataPlex values in HPC better and more like him, shouldn't they?