Blue Gene Gets Faster

IBM Blue Gene/L, the fastest supercomputer in the world, has broken its own
speed record, reaching a sustained performance of 135.5 teraflops-a trillion
calculations a second-and streaking to a record-breaking speed of 183.5
teraflops.

According to National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) spokesman Bryan
Wilkes, "Essentially it's only halfway built. Once it's together and
fully operating it's really going to be knocking it out." NNSA will need
all the computing power BlueGene can muster when it is fully built, Wilkes said,
because of the complicated calculations necessary to understand the effects of
aging on the United States' nuclear weapons cache.

The
version of Blue Gene being assembled for the Livermore lab is about half its
eventual size of 131,072 processors.

BlueGene is expected to be able to process 367 teraflops per second when it
is complete. The computer, designed by IBM to pack more computing power into a
smaller package, has already been used by Lawrence Livermore researchers to
perform nuclear dynamics simulations.

IBM's supercomputer got its name from its application for running computer
simulations of biological processes. Supercomputing has been used in the past to
work out highly complex scientific problems, such as understanding the structure
of proteins to eventually improve drugs. They are also crucial in climate
research and in prediction models for natural events, such as tsunamis. IBM
recently set up a new unit to start getting its supercomputing power more
involved in solving business problems.

Courtesy: TechNewsWorld and BBC News