Project Kittyhawk: Building a Global-Scale Computer

This paper describes Project Kittyhawk, an undertaking at IBM Research to explore the construction of a next-generation platform capable of hosting many simultaneous web-scale workloads. The paper hypothesize that for a large class of web-scale workloads the Blue Gene/P platform is an order of magnitude more efficient to purchase and operate than the commodity clusters in use today. Driven by scientific computing demands the Blue Gene designers pursued an aggressive system-on-a-chip methodology that led to a scalable platform composed of air-cooled racks. Each rack contains more than a thousand independent computers with high-speed interconnects inside and between racks. The paper postulates that the same demands of efficiency and density apply to web-scale platforms.