IBM's BladeCenter JS20

[unixguru]

I thought you guys might like to know that I am now in charge of some IBM JS20 servers. These have PowerPC 970 processors at 1.6Ghz (NOT 970fx). The blades are about one inch thick and have dual processors and dual hard drives. The heat sinks are NOT that big. After seeing these, I am 100% convinced that a Powerbook G5 is doable, especially with the new low-power 970fx that IBM is supposedly just putting into production. So, I expect you'll see Steve Jobs announce it in January. I'm sure it'll be a nice computer.

I had hoped to get one of these machines, but after my experience with my iBook, I'm really leary about another notebook purchase from Apple. In addition, I just got a 1Ghz (mobile Pentium III) Dell Latitude C800 at work that someone else gave me after upgrading to a newer one -- an Inspiron that is really ugly and runs really hot (it requires a 130 watt power brick!). The Latitude is in really nice shape and is quite fast. I think it's a better machine than that Inspiron the guy "upgraded" to.

I'll probably be sending my iBook's motherboard in to a company that specializes in printed circuit board repair to have the Radeon PBGA package's solder reflowed and eventually put the Mac back into service. I suppose I could contact Apple customer service about the repair, but I assume they'll be pricks about it, and not dealing with them is probably worth the $37 it'll cost to have the board fixed by pros.

[alcimedes]

only $37 to have them fix the board? damn! that's cheap.

[Quagmire]

Do not forget that servers like the the Blade and Xserve G5 has alot of room to get airflow through the 1 inch enclosure. The Powerbooks have smaller footprints so the airflow is restricted. Most likely apple can get a G5 in an 1" enclosure but, it gets to hot and overheats. The only pbook I can see that will be safe with the G5 is the 17" and 15" Powerbook( 15" barely). The 12" in my mind might have to be killed or get a 1.5 Ghz G4.

[Wickers]

Dude!

If I read your post correctly... you are around an IBM BladeCenter. Sure, the heatsinks maybe small... but guess what... the damn thing could pop your eardrumb. That's how it stays cool, a stupid amout of air passing through each blade...

We don't want our Power Books taking flight with that kinda airflow.

[DMBand0026]

We don't want our Power Books taking flight with that kinda airflow.

Maybe you don't ;)

Seriously though. \/\/ickes is correct. The actual blades prove that it's possible to get the chip into an enclosure that's relatively thin, but that doesn't mean it's practical yet. Doable, yes. Practical, give 'em a few months :)

[unixguru]

Yeah, $37 for a solder reflow. Makes Apple's repair charges look a bit ridculous, wouldn't you say? But that's what the problem is -- solder joints failing and causing a bad connection. That's why when you push on the case, the lines go away, as many people have pointed out -- you're pushing the chip package against the board and making the connection again on the disconnected pins.

As far as the JS20, it just came in yesterday, and, admittedly, I haven't fired it up yet. But the things are so thin, I can't see a whole heck of a lot of air going through. I'll test them and make an updated post.

[Rhumgod]

Yes please let us know the impressions you have of it. The JS20 is supposed to be quite a nice system. If you can divulge, please let us know the OS you intend to run on it and the intended use of it. Thanks much unixguru.

[unixguru]

I believe they came with SuSE Linux on them. IBM now has AIX 5.2 running on the JS20 also. There are four blades, donated by IBM, and they are going to be used for bioinformatics. IBM has said that vectorizing bioinformatics code (like BLAST, for instance) yields excellent performance on the 970s. They have give us, under special license, new un-released compilers that are supposed to create very optimized code for these machines. The want us to build and test our apps on their machines because they are very interested in selling them in the bioinformatics field. Currently, most of our software is run on Intel-based clusters. We do have a couple of Sun machines, but they are not typically used for the compute-intensive stuff.

[wizard69]

There are four blades, donated by IBM, and they are going to be used for bioinformatics. IBM has said that vectorizing bioinformatics code (like BLAST, for instance) yields excellent performance on the 970s.

Interesting as that is the same market Apple is going after. Do take the time to post the results you get with these new compilers if permitted.

I do have to ask if Apples XServes where considered for this application or was the thought of free hardware to much to resist?

Dave

[dfiler]

...
The blades are about one inch thick and have dual processors and dual hard drives. The heat sinks are NOT that big. After seeing these, I am 100% convinced that a Powerbook G5 is doable
...Blades and other rack mount gear have the advantage of zero noise or power consumption constraints.

Rack mount gear is loud, really really loud. They run tiny fans at very high RPMs. They also typically don't make heavy use of modern GPUs nor have a built in screen and backlight. Add all this together and their is simply no comparison between the two as far as design constraints.

Blades are much much larger, run high speed fans and don't generate GPU, screen, or backlight related heat. Sure... they're both kinda flat. But that is where the similarity ends.

[unixguru]

Interesting as that is the same market Apple is going after. Do take the time to post the results you get with these new compilers if permitted.

I do have to ask if Apples XServes where considered for this application or was the thought of free hardware to much to resist?

Dave

We do have some of the XServe machines in a small cluster in a different department -- they just got set up yesterday. However, we are not especially concerned here with brand, just performance and price. The XServe is a decent computer, but its price is high. We have a 32-node cluster from HPAQ using Intel Xeon processors. We asked Apple for a quote and they were about twice the cost. We mentioned this to our Apple rep and asked if the company would be willing to give us a better deal, especially as this is high-profile stuff and the publicity would likely be good for Apple. But higher-ups were unwilling to give us any breaks that would even bring them close to matching HP's price. In my opinion this is a big part of Apple's problem -- they don't want to be competitive on price much of the time. They think their name and cool designs will sell. In some cases that's true, but for clustered computing, no one sees the servers anyway. And the software is just standard UNIX software; no GUI. So Mac OS X and its nice GUI and GUI programming toolkits has no advantage over Linux or AIX.

[Henriok]

I would be interessted in some pictures of the mobo. Iäve heard that the system controller might be constructed by apple.. "U3" came up when someone booted his JS20 Blade Center so..

And.. there's no GPU in a Blade Module and they do emitt some heat too.

[curiousuburb]

We don't want our Power Books taking flight with that kinda airflow.Maybe you don't ;)

The HoverBook. Redefining "Floating Point" Performance. ;)

[curiousuburb]

There was another post citing the IBM 'issues' with the 970 which specifically mentioned delays in shipping the JS20 as not due to the 970 per se, but 'unspecified memory bandwidth on the mobo' problems.

Now I'll have to dig through history for the links... found it (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-5402114.html)... end of section 1

Did you get any tips to report certain errors?

[curiousuburb]

I believe they came with SuSE Linux on them. IBM now has AIX 5.2 running on the JS20 also. There are four blades, donated by IBM, and they are going to be used for bioinformatics. IBM has said that vectorizing bioinformatics code (like BLAST, for instance) yields excellent performance on the 970s. They have give us, under special license, new un-released compilers that are supposed to create very optimized code for these machines. The want us to build and test our apps on their machines because they are very interested in selling them in the bioinformatics field. Currently, most of our software is run on Intel-based clusters. We do have a couple of Sun machines, but they are not typically used for the compute-intensive stuff.
OOooooh!

Finally, somebody who can add some real-world points to this graph.
http://article.pchome.net/2003/09/04/g5-22.jpg

It used to be on this page (http://www.apple.com/powermac/performance/), and caused a fuss. Gone now.

[unixguru]

I would be interessted in some pictures of the mobo. Iäve heard that the system controller might be constructed by apple.. "U3" came up when someone booted his JS20 Blade Center so..

And.. there's no GPU in a Blade Module and they do emitt some heat too.
I had my doubts, but, from what I just read, the computer's southbridge is connected into the northbridge via hypertransport. This sounds very much like the U3. Apparently there was some sort of collaborative effort on this chip so that it could also be used in IBM's blades. I'll check and post an update later.

There is a rather large ASIC on the board with a big heat sink, which is likely the machine's northbridge, but I can't see what it says on it due to that heat sink.

[Henriok]

There is a rather large ASIC on the board with a big heat sink, which is likely the machine's northbridge, but I can't see what it says on it due to that heat sink.Even if it is Apple's U3 it might not say so on the package. IBM can probably print whatever they like on it. I saw a log over the boot process and it mentioned "U3" and "Apple" in the same context so that migth be a way to check it without removing the heat sink. I havn't seen it confirmed though.. I hope you can.