Features:

NEW, POWERFUL CHIP BOASTS 160 TO 230 GIGAFLOPS

Researchers elaborated on a new life sciences chip that could become the foundation of a supercomputer operable at petaflop power. Japan's Research Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) spoke about the MDGrape 3 processor at Stanford University's Hot Chips conference.

Chip samples perform between 160 gigaflops at 250MHz up to 230 gigaflops while running 350 MHz. The specialized chip works best for life science research, where workloads may require many similar calculations on a small data set. The specialization allows the chip to achieve 100 times better performance.

The MDGrape chip was initiated by the University of Tokyo 15 years ago for astrophysics research. RIKEN has been working to extend the architecture to life sciences and molecular dynamics. The chip will be used to determine the characteristics of 3,000 proteins for its Protein 3000 project.

MDGrape 2 chips are currently being used by commercial systems and can run at 16 gigaflops and run at 100MHz. The newer chip is set to launch in applications by 2006.

Similar to the efforts of IBM and the University of Texas, the University of Tokyo is continuing research to develop a 1 teraflop general purpose chip.

The MDGrape 3 has a type of assembly line for its processor, with 20 pipelines for calculations as opposed to the one or two that typical chips use. Data is fed simultaneously to the pipelines through a broadcast memory architecture. The chip uses parallelization to cut down on calculation repetition. Still, the chip is built on the 130-nanometer process, like most manufactured chips.

The 350MHz Grape 3 can provide a gigaflop of computing power for $15, compared with $400 per gigaflop for a Pentium 4, $640 per gigaflop for the chips inside IBM's Blue Gene/L and a whopping $4,000 per gigaflop from NEC's Earth Simulator.

As far as power consumption is concerned, the 350MHz MDGrape 3 consumes 14 watts of power, or 0.1 watts per gigaflop. A 3GHz Pentium 4 runs at 82 watts, or 14 watts per gigaflop. The Blue Gene/L chip and Earth Simulator come in at 6 and 128 watts.

For the computer to run the MDGrape 3, RIKEN will have twelve chips on a board, while two boards will fit into a 2U-high box (3.5 inches). The chips are all connected to each other through an 81-bit bus, and the boards are connected to the rest of the computer through PCI Express.

The petaflop computer will consist of 6,144 processors on 512 boards clustered together. In all, the system will fit into 32 boxes that will stand on 19-inch pedestals.