IBM builds baby Blue Gene computer

By Steve Malone

Posted on 15 Jun 2005 at 12:03

IBM has built a version of the Blue Gene/L supercomputer for itself. Said to be the most powerful privately owned computer in the world, IBM intends to carry out its own research on the machine as well as renting out its time to third parties.

Taking up the space of 20 refrigerator-sized racks, the Blue Gene is installed at IBM's own Thomas Watson research laboratory in New York State. Known as the BGW, the baby Blue has a processing speed of 91.29 teraflops. IBM claims that this makes it one of the three fastest in the world including the sister machine the Blue Gene/L supercomputer installed at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory.

IBM says that the BGW machine can be applied to a variety of outside work including life sciences, hydrodynamics, materials sciences, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, fluid dynamics and business applications.

In case anyone is wondering what IBM is planning to do with its stocks of PowerPC chips now that Apple does not want them, the BlueGene/L is about to get a further boost. When work to install a 64 rack system with over 130,000 IBM PowerPC processors is completed later this year at the DOE's/NNSA's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the resulting machine will have a peak flow of 360 teraflops.