Blue Gene Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Blue Gene refers to an IBM project intended to develop the next class of petaflop-scale supercomputers.The first computer in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/L, developed through a partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cost $100 million and is intended to scale to speeds in the hundreds of teraflops, with a peak performance of 360 teraflops. This is almost ten times as fast as the Earth Simulator, the fastest supercomputer of the world before Blue Gene. Two Blue Gene/L prototypes have entered the Top 500 Supercomputer List at the #4 and #8 positions. On September 29, 2004, IBM announced that a Blue Gene/L prototype had overtaken NEC's Earth Simulator as the fastest computer in the world, with a speed of 36.01 teraflops, beating Earth Simulator's 35.86 teraflops. The machine later reached a speed of 70.72 teraflops.
The Blue Gene computer architecture is designed to scale to speeds of up to one petaflops. Blue Gene/L will have a total of 65,536 processors. Some of the nodes will use the Linux operating system. Each processor will be attached to three parallel communications networks: a 3D toroidal network for peer-to-peer communication, a tree network for collective communication, and an Ethernet network for booting and diagnostics.
With so many nodes, components will be failing frequently. Thus, the system will be able to electrically isolate faulty hardware to allow the machine to continue to run.
In public relations terms, it is being positioned as the successor of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer; however it bears little architectural resemblance to Deep Blue.
External links
See: 'Blue' Gene Tyranny
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