IBM plans to reduce the size of the Watson supercomputer to the size of a pizza box

A team of researchers from IBM is currently working on a project to significantly reduce server sizes. In fact, we are talking about the goal of reducing the size of high-performance systems such as IBM Watson to the size of a pizza box.

This project is carried out simultaneously with the five-year project Dome, a joint work of IBM and the Institute of Radio Astronomy (the Netherlands). The miniaturization of high-performance systems is ideal for creating the world's largest telescope, the Square Kilometer Array. Tiny productive servers will process the data received from this telescope.
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Currently, the first results on the miniaturization project are ready: IBM managed to combine 128 computers - which function as blades - into a single server. This server is equal in performance to servers that are 4-10 times larger. Energy consumption in this case is 55-60 watts, which is significantly lower than the power consumption of systems of similar size with similar performance.

In the "compacted" server 1536 processor cores capable of working with 3072 threads simultaneously. Testing of such a system was carried out with IBM DB2 software. The maximum amount of RAM in such a system can reach 6 TB, which can significantly increase the performance of applications that run in memory, for example, various DBMS. Among other things, the authors of the project plan to use miniature high-performance systems to solve various analytical tasks and work with cloud applications.

Next year, IBM plans to launch a similar server with a power consumption of 30-35 watts.

According to the head of the project, the main task of the project team at present is to significantly reduce the energy consumption of high-performance systems, as well as the size of such systems. Data centers consume megawatts of energy, and the new project will help reduce electricity bills.

The size of the board of the new mini-server is 133 * 55 mm. The authors of the project claim that systems of similar performance are performed on boards of size 305 * 245 mm. The new servers are equipped with 12-core T4240 processors with PowerPC architecture.

IBM plans to further reduce the size of the servers by integrating various blocks, including the computing unit, system logic, memory controllers, and storage unit. This integration and reduced board size are important for reducing power consumption. That's because now about 98% of the energy is spent to transfer data from point A to point B at the processor and board level. In this case, the data fall from block to block, pass through a number of channels. The smaller the board and the blocks, the lower the energy costs in the production systems.