In a recent report from the Irish Times, it appears that IBM is cutting off what is left of the server manufacturing jobs at the company’s Emerald Isle factory. The reason for the loss is said to be due to the fact that IBM is shifting its server-making to factories the company owns in Shenzhen, China.
With this cutback IBM has lowered its overall workforce in Ireland to around 4,000 employees. This number does include the 190 jobs that IBM just cut as well as 200 employees that the company recently added back in March for a Smarter Planet research center and an additional 100 added to the company’s software labs around the country.
IBM released in a statement not too long ago that they were moving their high-end server manufacturing for the Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions to factories in Singapore. IBM did note that they were keeping a “foot in the door” in the European Union by keeping entry and mid-range server manufacturing in the factory IBM has in Mulhuddart, which lies just outside of Dublin.
IBM has also shut down and outsourced all of their x64 server plants located in Scotland aside from very high-end System z and BladeCenter platforms. The Power Unix manufacturing that IBM had in Austin, Texas was also recently moved to Rochester, Minnesota.
Due to this recent cut in jobs, Ireland will be out of the IBM server manufacturing business completely. This also raises questions as to when IMB’s mid-range Power Systems will be shifted to China as well. IBM said that they will try to find jobs for as many of the 190 employees as possible. IBM said that all of the 190 employees will receive five weeks of severance pay for every year they served with the company.
According to IBM, “This change will place us closer to our growth markets and suppliers while providing greater operational efficiency and cost savings.” The shipping costs to get Power and z10 processors to China or Singapore are fairly small. However, the expensive shipping costs it takes to transport finished Power Systems and mainframe servers to European and African customers is definitely offset by the lowered labor costs of China and Singapore.
If you recall last year, the Jaguar Cray XT5 Supercomputer topped the list as the worlds fastest supercomputer utilizing six-core AMD Opteron processors. Six months later, AMD continues to hold the reigning spot on the TOP500 Supercomputer List announced just a few days ago at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. Jaguar continues to be the world’s highest performing system featuring nearly a quarter million cores. The Cray XT5 was improved nearly 70% last year and continues to process 1.75 petaflop per second, up from 1.04 in June 2009.
Additional Top 10 systems based on AMD technology are:
#3: Roadrunner – Los Alamos National Labratory: A hybrid system from IBM utilizing BladeCenter cluster technology in conjunction with AMD Opteron processors and has a processing speed of 1.042 petaflops per second.
#4: Kraken – University of Tennesse: A Cray XT5 system similar to Jaguar which peaks at .83 petaflops.
#7: Tianhe-1 – National SuperComputer Center, China: Another hybrid system using ATI Radeon graphics processors from AMD and has a processing speed of .56 petaflops per second.
The number of AMD technology-based Supercomputers on the TOP500 now stands at 51 with systems that can be found across the globe including in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and Norway. AMD technology currently drives more than 4.2 Petaflops of computing power in the TOP10 alone which is used by universities and national labs to conduct research in engineering, finance, climate predictions, and energy efficient designs. In addition, Cray has recently announced plans for its next-generation Cray XE6 supercomputer which will be based on AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors and have the ability to scale to more than 1 million cores.
“Our customers are selecting AMD platforms for supercomputing because they provide the cores, the memory, the power savings and clearly the performance that the world’s leading research institutions require for their ground-breaking work,” said John Fruehe, director, Server and Embedded product marketing at AMD. “AMD has been a leader in delivering the benefits of x86 and open source computing to the HPC community and it will be exciting to see what further advances the AMD Fusion™ family of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) will bring.”
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Very soon, Microsoft will be unleashing a state-of-the-art data center in Washington after receiving a tax cut from local politicos. Microsoft has promised to open up what it is calling “one of the most innovative new data centers” in Quincy, Washington in the early part of this year. There aren’t a whole lot of details, but it is said that the center is expected to host services like Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
This new data center is based almost entirely on pre-assembled computing models that are designed to give you a greater scale as well as greater flexibility. The center also uses server cooling techniques that were developed at the Dublin and Chicago data centers of Microsoft in order to help cut running costs. The data center will open up next to Microsoft’s existing 500,000-square-foot data center facility in Quincy, which was opened back in 2007.
General Manager of Microsoft’s Data Center Services Kevin Timmons wrote in a blog post that the expansion takes new ideas that were forged in Dublin and Chicago one step further, using modular building blocks for electrical, mechanical, server and security subsystems. At Microsoft’s other data centers the modules were capable of scaling from 400 to 2,000 servers.
According to Timmons, “Our modular design enables us to build a facility in significantly less time while reducing capital costs by an average of 50% to 60% over the lifetime of the project.”
This new design means that the Quincy extension will be housed in a steel and aluminum structure instead of the concrete building that is the existing Quincy center. A report from Data Center Knowledge back in May said that the building will completely lack side walls. This news comes following an eight month experiment where Microsoft ran five HP servers in an outside tent with absolutely no failures.
“The Structure,” according to Timmons, “is virtually transparent to ambient outdoor conditions, allowing us to essentially place our servers and storage outside in the cool air while still protecting it from the elements. The interior layout is specifically designed to allow us to further innovate in the ways that we deploy equipment in future phases of the project.”
This is all very exciting stuff, but it almost didn’t happen. Back in 2009, Microsoft released news that they were closing the existing Quincy data center and moving operations to San Antonio, Texas. This news came as a Washington tax exemption that favored data center providers was set to expire. However, local politicians responded with a 15-month sales tax exemption on the purchase and installation of computers and energy for new data centers in 32 rural counties in the state of Washington, the place where Microsoft has called home for 32 years.
This tax break was backed by the political pressure group Washington Needs Jobs who has members including Microsoft, Yahoo and VMware as well as the Washington Technology Industry Association and the town of Quincy. It was also said that, along with Microsoft, Yahoo and VMware are also planning on producing data centers in Washington.
Source: The Register
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