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IBM gets Blue Gen to 1 petaflop speed

by on27 June 2007

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Pretty fast! 

   

    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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Last modified on 27 June 2007
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