ENGINEERING

With a LINPACK benchmark of 27.4 Teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second) of sustained performance, the IBM Blue Gene system to be unveiled today by Maria van der Hoeven, Dutch Minister of Education and Science in Groningen (Netherlands), is the fastest supercomputer in Europe. The computer will be the heart of a new type of radio telescope developed by ASTRON, a leading astronomy organization in the Netherlands. The next Top500 List of supercomputers is slated to be published in June 2005, but if the list were published today, the IBM Blue Gene installation at Groningen would be the fourth most powerful system on the list, making it the fastest supercomputer in Europe. "The grand challenge ASTRON is undertaking, researching the formation of the universe, requires processing unprecedented amount of data ," said Dave Turek, vice president, Deep Computing, IBM. "Blue Gene provides the unique flexibility and power to enable the ASTRON researchers perform the high-speed calculations needed in real time." The ASTRON IBM Blue Gene will gather and analyze information from ASTRON's Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) "software telescope" network. Unlike current observatories that use large optical mirrors or radio dishes to point to distant galaxies, ASTRON will harness more than 25,000 simple radio antennas. These are spread across the Netherlands and into the German state of Lower Saxony. Blue Gene combines and interprets the signals of all antennas through high-speed calculations. LOFAR is capable of 'hearing' signals as far as 13 billion light years from earth, which allows it to look back in time as far as the beginnings of the earliest stars and galaxies after the formation of the universe, known as the Big Bang. A consortium of universities, research institutes and companies plan to carry out research programs with the telescope when it becomes operational in 2006. The radio antennas will be connected via a fibre network to the supercomputer which is located in the Compute Centre of the University of Groningen. The computer will process enormous amounts of data, circa 800 Gigabits per second. This is similar to processing the data stored on 800 CD´s or 20 DVD´s per second. A team of IBM researchers and designers have collaborated with ASTRON scientists to optimize the system and make it capable of processing the huge amounts of data real time. Over 12,000 PowerPC microprocessors provide the "brains" of the system. With the size of 62.4 square feet (6 square meters), a weight of 10,900 lbs (5000 kilograms) and a power consumption of 150 KW this Blue Gene system is a low-power consuming, compact machine compared to conventional supercomputers.