Blue Gene is a massively parallel computer being developed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Blue Gene represents a hundred-fold improvement on performance compared with the fastest supercomputers of today. It will achieve 1 PetaFLOP/sec through unprecedented levels of parallelism in excess of 4,0000,000 threads of execution. The Blue Gene project has two important goals, in which understanding of biologically import processes will be advanced, as well as advancement of knowledge of cellular architectures (massively parallel system built of single chip cells that integrate processors, memory and communication), and of the software needed to exploit those effectively. This massively parallel system of 65,536 nodes is based on a new architecture that exploits system-on-a-chip technology to deliver target peak processing power of 360 teraFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second). The machine is scheduled to be operational in the 2004-2005 time frame, at price/performance and power consumption/performance targets unobtainable with conventional architectures.
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