“IBM is shedding light on a program to create the world’s
fastest supercomputer, illuminating a dual-pronged strategy, an
unusual new processor design and a proclivity for the Linux
operating system.“‘Blue Gene’ is an ambitious project to expand the horizons of
supercomputing, with the ultimate goal of creating a system that
can perform one quadrillion calculations per second, or one
petaflop. IBM expects a machine it calls Blue Gene/P to be the
first to achieve the computational milestone. Today’s fastest
machine, NEC’s Earth Simulator is comparatively slow–about
one-thirtieth of a petaflop–but fast enough to worry the United
States government that the country is losing its computing lead to
Japan.“‘Blue Gene is a completely oddball,
you’ve-never-seen-anything-like-this-before design,’ said
Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice. ‘It is not custom everything,
(but) it is still very exotic compared to anything you can
buy…”
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