Blue Gene/L tops its own supercomputer record
IBM, which is internationally known for its business machines and large-scale servers and supercomputers, revealed Thursday in conjunction with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the newest version of Blue Gene/L. This massive supercomputer broke its own record for calculations (which was 138.6 Tflops, or trillion calculations per second) to over double of the original record: 280.6 teraflops. This should significantly help with protein research and also help the military with nuclear blast simulations. Now this is power! (thanks goes to kenc for his contribution on this one)
The 65,536-processor machine can sustain 280.6 trillion calculations per second, called 280.6 teraflops, IBM said Thursday. That’s the top end of the range IBM forecast and more than twice the previous Blue Gene/L record of 136.8 teraflops, set when only half the machine was installed. In addition, the lab unveiled a lesser known but also powerful machine with a speed up to 100 teraflops. The ASC Purple is built from more conventional IBM server products. Together, ASC Purple and Blue Gene/L cost $290 million. Both will be used for nuclear weapons simulations and other computationally demanding tasks. Broadly speaking, both machines use a similar approach: A powerful network connects huge numbers of processors. But there are differences. ASC Purple’s 12,544 Power5 processors are individually more powerful than the specialized Power chip variants used in Blue Gene/L. And, each ASC Purple processor has access to more memory so that more complicated simulations can run. However, Blue Gene/L consumes less power, and instead of using a massive, complex central switch to connect processors, it uses a collection of five separate networks.
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