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Next generation energy-efficient supercomputer to break ‘quadrillion’ barrier
IBM has announced the second generation of what it claims to be, the world's most powerful supercomputer named Blue Gene/P.
IBM has announced the second generation of what it claims to be, the world's most powerful supercomputer named Blue Gene/P. Blue Gene/P nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L –which is currently described as the world's fastest computer -- while remaining what is thought to be the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built.The result is a machine that enables science and commercial supercomputing to attack vital problems in ways never before possible -- modelling an entire human organ to determine drug interactions, for example. Drug researchers could run simulated clinical trials on 27 million patients in one afternoon using just a sliver of the machine's full power.The IBM System Blue Gene/P Solution scales to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one "petaflop" -- or one-quadrillion operations per second. The system is 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than the combined power of a stack of laptop computers nearly 1.5 miles high. The Blue Gene/P supercomputer can be configured to reach speeds in excess of three petaflops, a performance level that many thought unattainable only a few short years ago.The IBM system will be capable of up to three thousand trillion calculations per second."Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has yet known," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing, IBM. "A new group of commercial users will be able to take advantage of its new, simplified programming environment and unrivalled energy efficiency. We see commercial interest in the Blue Gene supercomputer developing now in energy and finance, for example. This is on course with an adoption cycle -- from government labs to leading enterprises -- that we've seen before in the high-performance computing market."The Blue Gene supercomputer was purpose-built to fit in smaller spaces and use less electricity compared to other commercially available designs. Today, the Blue Gene/P supercomputer is said to be at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer.The BlueGene supercomputer design uses many small, low-power embedded chips each connected through five specialized networks inside the system.Some of the world's leading research laboratories and universities have already placed orders for Blue Gene/P supercomputers. The U.S. Dept. of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Ill., will deploy the first Blue Gene/P supercomputer in the U.S. beginning later this year. In Germany, the Max Planck Society and Forschungszentrum Julich also plan to begin installing Blue Gene/P systems in late 2007. Additional Blue Gene/P system rollouts are being planned by Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, England."We view the installation of the Blue Gene/P system as the next phase of a strategic partnership furthering advances in computation in support of breakthrough science," said Robert Rosner, director, Argonne National Laboratory.At FZ Julich, where researchers have been using a Blue Gene/L machine for two years, a Blue Gene/P system will allow for more breakthrough science -- in such areas as particle physics and nanotech, for example -- while keeping the research facility within acceptable power budgets. "The big computing power at low electricity rates allows us to boost the performance of very complex and computationally intensive algorithms," said Thomas Lippert, director of the supercomputing center at FZ Julich.In Germany, a Blue Gene/P supercomputer will become the platform for new applications scaled for petaflop-level performance at the Max Planck society. "The next-generation Blue Gene system will improve our capacity to prepare, develop and optimize applications from the Max Planck Society for future peta-scale computing," said Hermann Lederer, head of application support at Max Planck's RZG/Garching Computing Centre.
