IBM claims that it has got its new Blue Gene/P supercomputer, operating at petaflop speed.
The
computer apparently performs more operations than a 1.5-mile-high stack
of laptops. However we would have thought if you stuck that many
laptops on top of each other the bottom mile or so would collapse under
weight.
IBM wants Blue Gene to manage more than 3 quadrillion
operations a second, or 3 petaflops. However it is designed to
continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations.
According
to ZDNet the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory will
deploy the first Blue Gene/P in the US later this year. Meanwhile, in
Germany, the Max Planck Society and the Forschungszentrum Julich
research centre will start to install a one in late 2007.
The Blue
Gene/P runs on a basic unit of four PowerPC 450 cores running at 850MHz
each. A circuit board containing 32 of the Blue Gene/P chips can churn
out 435 billion operations a second.
A petaflop Blue Gene/P has 294,912 processors and takes up 72 racks in all.
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