Argonne's Blue Gene/P gets more muscle

IBM is looking to bring the first of its Blue Gene/P system supercomputers to North America with an agreement to build a new machine at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, the company announced Nov. 1.

Argonne is already installing a new Blue Gene/P that is slower than the 445 teraflops model due for installation next year. When the two are combined, they will operate at 556 teraflops. The lab also operates an older Blue Gene/L model that will continue to run separately at 5.7 teraflops.

IBM first announced that it would begin building Blue Gene/P system supercomputers at the Supercomputer Conference in Dresden, Germany, on June 26. These will eventually replace the older Blue Gene/L system supercomputer. IBM is currently building its first Blue Gene/P system at the Julich Research Center in Germany.

"If all six billion people on Earth were participating in a science computation, each person would need to do 70,000 additions or multiplications per second to keep up with the Blue Gene/P. Moreover, the Blue Gene/P systems consume a fraction of the power per teraflop required by similar systems built around commodity microprocessors. This energy-efficient solution reduces power demands and lowers operating costs."

To the complete press release.