KEY POINTS:
IBM outdid itself today, literally.
The computer company made public details of its new supercomputer, Blue Gene/P. The machine takes over the mantle of world's fastest computer from its predecessor Blue Gene/L - by trebling its performance.
It can continuously exceed speeds of over one petaflop - or a quadrillion floating point operations per second.
And it can be configured to reach speeds of 3PFLOP.
This makes the machine roughly 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC, and the company claims the new Blue Gene can process more operations in one second than the combined grunt of a stack of laptops nearly 2.5 kilometres high.
IBM says the scientific ramifications of this level of power are massive, and would allow researchers to model an entire human organ to determine drug reaction.
It could run simulated clinical trials on 27 million patients in an afternoon, on "just a sliver of the machine's full power".
"Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," says Dave Turek, VP of deep computing at IBM.
Research laboratories across America and in Germany have already placed orders with IBM for the supercomputer, with the first installation to be completed for the US Department of Energy later this year.
Interestingly, the machine is considered 'green', seven times less power-hungry than Blue Gene/L.
The specs are staggering - four IBM 850 MHz PowerPC 450 processors are integrated on a single chip. Each of these chips are capable of running 13.6 billion operations every second.
A board containing 32 chips churns out 435 billion operations ever second. There are 32 boards in each six-foot rack, with each rack running at 13.9 trillion operations per second.
The one-petaflop configuration is a 294,912 processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high speed optical network.
The Blue Gene/P can be scaled to an 884,736 processor, 216-rack cluster to hit the three-petaflop mark.
Sun Microsystems is aiming to get amongst the supercomputer stoush, with its Constellation system, recently contracted by University of Texas' Advanced Computer System for $US59 million, is expected to hit two petaflops.
- NZ HERALD STAFF
