IBM Corp’s RS/6000 SP2 massively parallel processor will be offered this fall for key vertical applications with a hot new search accelerator chip originally developed for the Deep Blue chess program. According to Infoworld, Deep Blue, designed to search large databases and examine different chess moves, uses eight to 12 highly specialized accelerator chips attached to each Power 2 Super Chip node processor to speed simple search algorithms. It says IBM will offer these accelerator chips, featuring an added logic circuit and large static RAM, for use by customers doing molecular dynamics. IBM’s commercial division may also offer general-purpose accelerator chips for its data-mining customers, but sad to say, the chips are currently too expensive to put in every SP2. IBM will also phase out the Micro Channel bus and switch to the PCI bus in the SP2. Planned software enhancements include text and object searching in the next DB2/6000 release, due to ship this summer, and the capability to perform Boolean searches with imprecise parameters. The Deep Blue team may also add tools for dynamic load balancing between nodes, the paper says.
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