IBM's Blue Gene Breaks New Research Ground

KingFishKingFish
edited September 2004 in Science & Tech
With the interest in using supercomputing to advance medical science still on the rise, IBM said a Japanese research laboratory will use its Blue Gene/L machine to study proteins, hoping to create better drugs to treat human diseases.
Pulleyblank said when Blue Gene/L is installed in February 2005, the system will consist of four rack machines, with 1,024 nodes per rack. It will be based on IBM's Power architecture and will run at a peak processing speed of 22.8 teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second. As of today, this would put it at No. 3 on the Top 500 supercomputing list. Calling AIST's choice of Blue Gene/L over other systems "validation that we are getting this right," Pulleyblank said the supercomputer will be 24 times more powerful compared to the CBRC's current computer systems. Moreover, it uses about 1/10th the power per computation of and only about 1/16th the floor space of most systems on the vaunted Top 500 list, where IBM regularly butts heads with such rivals as SGI (Quote, Chart), Cray (Quote, Chart), HP (Quote, Chart), Sun Microsystems and Dell (Quote, Chart). The AIST scientists are also creating high-performance computer applications for molecular simulation, mass spectrometry analysis, and cell simulation. Pulleyblank said that to make Blue Gene effective for disease research, IBM's researchers became well-versed in how genomes work, as well as the complex topic of protein folding.
Someone hurry up and recruit them for Team 93. -KF

Source: Internet News

Comments

  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited September 2004
    And I'll betcha it WON'T be using Itaniums either. ;D
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