100 000 times more powerful than a home PC
Blue Gene/P, the second generation of the world's most powerful supercomputer, nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L — currently the world's fastest computer — while remaining the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built.
The result is a machine that towers over other systems. It enables science and commercial supercomputing to attack vital problems in ways never before possible — modeling an entire human organ to determine drug interactions, for example. Drug researchers could run simulated clinical trials on 27 million patients in one afternoon using just a sliver of the machine's full power.
The IBM System Blue Gene/P Solution scales to operate continuously at speeds exceeding one "petaflop" — or one-quadrillion operations per second.
The system is 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than the combined power of a stack of laptop computers nearly 1.5 miles high.
The Blue Gene/P supercomputer can be configured to reach speeds in excess of three petaflops, a performance level that many thought unattainable only a few short years ago.
"Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing, IBM.
"A new group of commercial users will be able to take advantage of its new, simplified programming environment and unrivaled energy efficiency. We see commercial interest in the Blue Gene supercomputer developing now in energy and finance, for example. This is on course with an adoption cycle — from government labs to leading enterprises — that we've seen before in the high-performance computing market."
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