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IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer |
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Written by CB Team
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Thursday, 28 June 2007 |
 IBM has unveiled its Blue Gene/P supercomputer - the second generation Blue Gene. According to IBM, the newest supercomputer nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L, while remaining the most energy-efficient and space-saving computer on the market.
The Blue Gene/P is designed to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one “petaflop” – or one-quadrillion operations per second. Blue Gene/P is at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer.
Inside the Fastest Computer Ever Built
- Like its predecessor, the Blue Gene/P supercomputer is a modular design, composed of "racks" that can be added as requirements grow.
- Four IBM (850 MHz) PowerPC 450 processors are integrated on a single Blue Gene/P chip. Each chip is capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. A two-foot-by-two-foot board containing 32 of these chips churns out 435 billion operations every second, making it more powerful than a typical, 40-node cluster based on two-core commodity processors. Thirty-two of the compact boards comprise the 6-foot-high racks. Each rack runs at 13.9 trillion operations per second, 1,300 times faster than today's fastest home PC.
- The one-petaflop Blue Gene/P supercomputer configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical network. The Blue Gene/P system can be scaled to an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster to achieve three-petaflop performance. A standard Blue Gene/P supercomputer configuration will house 4,096 processors per rack.
IBM
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 28 June 2007 )
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