IBM's Blue Gene/L broke its own record, reaching 135.5 teraflops - billions of calculation operations per second. This calculation rate is double what is required for Blue Gene/L to take the first place in the list of 500 most powerful computers in the world.
IBM's Blue Gene/L broke its own record, reaching 135.5 teraflops - billions of calculation operations per second. This calculation rate is double what is required for Blue Gene/L to take the first place in the list of 500 most powerful computers in the world. This is what the BBC news site said recently
IBM's Blue Gene/L computer, which marked the new milestone in the world of supercomputers, is now in the process of being assembled for the laboratories of the US Department of Energy, named after Lawrence Livermore. The system performed 70.72 teraflops last year, knocking NEC's Earth Simulator out of first place in the world's most powerful systems chart.
Blue Gene/L is expected to be perfect during this year. Its theoretical performance peak is expected to be 360 teraflops, in a machine that includes 64 full base cabinets.
The new record of Blue Gene/L was achieved by doubling the number of base cabinets of the machine introduced last year, and increasing it from 16 to 32. Each such base cabinet includes 1,024 processors in IBM's POWER architecture, which is completely identical to the processors in IBM's standard production servers.
The processors are dual-core - two full processing engines in each processor.
The Blue Gene/L computer in its final configuration will assist in safety, security and reliability studies in the US nuclear weapons stockpile, and will save the need for underground nuclear testing.
Supercomputers were used in the past to solve complex scientific problems, such as understanding the structure of proteins, in an attempt to improve drugs and discover new drugs. These computers play a central role in climate studies, and in models for predicting natural disasters, such as tsunamis. Today, these computers are used to solve everyday problems, such as managing air traffic control in civil aviation.
IBM also makes it possible to rent supercomputer capacity, in order to help customers solve complex problems that require extremely high computing power. Not long ago, the company established a new unit dealing with the application of supercomputers to solve business problems. Computers where, among other things, the computer characters in the movie "The Lord of the Rings" were created, are also available for rent. A cluster of 1,008 processors installed in New Zealand is billed by the hour per processor.
IBM's supercomputer is already used to design innovative yachts, and to examine algorithms for decoding gene sequences.
Since the world's first supercomputer, Cray-1, was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratories in 1976, the calculation rate has jumped 500,000 times: Cray-1 performed 80 megaflops (80 million operations per second), compared to 135.5 billion operations on IBM's Blue Gene/L , in its current configuration.
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