IBM Blue Gene

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hardware
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software
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keywords

protein folding

Introduction

IBM releases a follow up of Deep Blue.

Nicknamed Blue Gene it operates by 1 Quadrillion Ops per second (one peta flop) and is a thousand times faster than Deep Blue.

one processor board: IBM blue gene(3)

Description(1)

The computer will be used for modelling human proteins: to be exactly the folding of human proteins. A source for human deseases. So this unraveling of the code can help farmaceutic laboratories to develop medicins.

The experimental architecture of the machine is called SMASH (Simple, Many And Self Healing. It is designed to reduce the number of instructions for a particular processor to speed up processing.
It also has what is called massive parallelism to handle about 8 million simultaneous threads of computing and has self healing abilities to prevent failures.

But that last aspect is nothing new.

Specifications

price: USD 100.000.000 (1999)

> 1.000.000 processors

One Quadrillion (2) operations per second or 1.000.000.000 Megaflops (500.000.000 for a high end PC 1999)

8.000.000 computation threads, appr 222 m2  foot print

Reference

Deep Blue

Release history