Cyclops64

Cyclops64 (formerly known as Blue Gene/C) is a cellular architecture in development by IBM. The Cyclops64 project aims to create the first "supercomputer on a chip".

History

Cyclops64 is part of the Blue Gene effort, to produce the next several generations of supercomputers. The projects were started in response to the announced construction of the Earth Simulator.

Cyclops64 is a cooperative project between the United States Department of Energy (which is partially funding the project), the U.S. Department of Defense, industry (IBM in particular), and academia.

The architecture was conceived by Seymour Cray Award winner Monty Denneau, who is currently leading the project.

Architecture overview

Each 64-bit Cyclops64 chip (processor) will run at 500 megahertz and contain 80 processors. Each processor will have two thread units and a floating point unit. A thread unit is an in-order 64-bit RISC core with 32 kB scratch pad memory, using a 60-instruction subset of the Power Architecture instruction set. Five processors share a 32 kB instruction cache.