Technically Speaking

IBM is expected to announce the type of performance they are predicting for their dishwasher sized supercomputer. Performing calculations at 1.4 trillion per second, IBM believes will make this machine the world’s 73rd fastest supercomputer.

Blue Gene/L is a somewhat exotic machine that’s the first phase of an IBM project to tackle an intractable computing problem in genetic research: using the laws of physics to predict how crucial biochemical components called proteins fold from a long chain of building blocks into a complicated structure.

Blue Gene/L’s specialized processors currently run at 700MHz, but next year will be 40 percent faster, Bill Pulleyblank, director of IBM’s Deep Computing group and the executive overseeing the project. With the full configuration of 64 racks and roughly 131,072 processors, IBM hopes to achieve a speed of 360 trillion calculations per second–360 gigateraflops in supercomputing argot.

“Blue Gene” is an ambitious project to expand the horizons of supercomputing, with the ultimate goal of creating a system that can perform one quadrillion calculations per second, or one petaflop. Today’s fastest machine, NEC’s Earth Simulator is comparatively slow–about one-thirtieth of a petaflop–but fast enough to worry the U.S. government that the country is losing its computing lead to Japan.

IBM plans to have Blue Gene/L by 2005 and Blue Gene/P in 2006. Blue Gene/P is expected to be the first supercomputer to surpass the petaflop barrier, making us the country with the world’s fastest supercomputer.

Source: ZDNet

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2003 at 6:22 am and is filed under Supercomputers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.