IBM triples performance of World's Fastest Computer and breaks the "Quadrillion" Barrier

The world of computing continually throws up feats that are difficult to comprehend. If the world’s fastest car or world’s tallest building were suddenly to be outperformed by a factor of three, we’d be incredulous, yet such quantum leaps have become routine in the world of computing. IBM’s new Blue Gene/P is the second generation of the world's most powerful supercomputer. It triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L while remaining the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built. Blue Gene/P scales to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one petaflop (one-quadrillion operations per second) and can be configured to reach speeds in excess of three petaflops. The system is 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than a stack of laptop computers 1.5 miles high (don’t try this at home folks).

The result is a machine that towers over other systems. It enables science and commercial supercomputing to attack vital problems in ways never before possible -- modeling 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.

IBM researcher Shawn Hall inspects a new Blue Gene/P supercomputer. 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 ever 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 unrivaled 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."

A Green Design Ahead of its Time

The Blue Gene supercomputer line was born from a visionary IBM initiative to develop a hugely scalable and highly reliable scientific computing platform. With Blue Gene, designers sidestepped two key constraints on state-of-the-art supercomputing -- power usage and space requirements. 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 at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer.

The influence of the Blue Gene supercomputer's energy-efficient design and computing model -- once considered exotic -- can be seen everywhere in the industry where people have attempted to lower energy use and get performance without traditional reliance on chip frequency. The breakthrough 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.

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