IBM triples performance of World's Fastest Computer and breaks the "Quadrillion" Barrier

Wed, 07/18/2007 - 20:20 - NLN

The world of computing continually throws up feats that are difficult to comprehend. If the world’s fastest car or world’s tallest building were suddenly to be outperformed by a factor of three, we’d be incredulous, yet such quantum leaps have become routine in the world of computing. IBM’s new Blue Gene/P is the second generation of the world's most powerful supercomputer. It triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L while remaining the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built. Blue Gene/P scales to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one petaflop (one-quadrillion operations per second) and can be configured to reach speeds in excess of three petaflops.

The system is 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than a stack of laptop computers 1.5 miles high (don’t try this at home folks).

The result is a machine that towers over other systems. It enables science and commercial supercomputing to attack vital problems in ways never before possible -- modeling an entire human organ to determine drug interactions, for example. Drug researchers could run simulated clinical trials on 27 million patients in one afternoon using just a sliver of the machine's full power.

IBM researcher Shawn Hall inspects a new Blue Gene/P supercomputer. The IBM system will be capable of up to three thousand trillion calculations per second.

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