IBM Kittyhawk

Kittyhawk is a new theoretical IBM supercomputer. The proposed project entails constructing a global-scale shared supercomputer capable of hosting the entire Internet on one platform as an application, whereas the current Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks.^[1][2]

In 2010 IBM open sourced the Linux kernel patches that allow otherwise unmodified Linux distributions to run on Blue Gene/P. This action allowed the Kittyhawk system software stack to be run at large scale at Argonne National Lab. The open source version of Kittyhawk is available on a public website hosted by Boston University.^[3]

IBM has prepared a white paper^[4] detailing the project. The Kittyhawk will be based on the previously developed IBM supercomputer called Blue Gene/P. In theory the Kittyhawk will have up to 16,384 racks, providing a maximum of 67.1 million cores with 32 PB (32 PiB) of memory.^[5]

1. ^ IBM Proposes One Computer to Run Entire Internet
2. ^ One computer to rule them all
3. ^ Open Source Kittyhawk
4. ^ IBM White Paper
5. ^ IBM explores 67.1m-core computer for running entire internet