INDUSTRY

Today, IBM plans to announce the new system called "Blue Gene Watson" (BGW) performed 91.3 teraflops. That places it in second on the current Top500 list. Also, first place belongs to IBM's original Blue Gene/L system located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and performed 135 teraflops. IBM's announcement comes two weeks before other vendors release their benchmark results. The next list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputing systems will be announced at the 2005 International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, Germany. The list is unveiled twice yearly. The higher speed, measured with an algebraic calculation test called Linpack, puts IBM another notch ahead of Silicon Graphics, whose Columbia system at NASA reached 51.9 teraflops last fall. Big Blue has a healthy lead in the list and expects to stay on top. The Livermore machine is in line for another doubling in size and, roughly, performance. IBM sells the Blue Gene systems for about $2 million per rack; each rack has 1,024 processors, and Blue Gene Watson has 20 racks. IBM also rents out access to the system. Blue Gene Watson is located at the IBM Thomas Watson Research Center. “IBM researchers will use BGW to accelerate discovery in a variety of disciplines,” said Tilak Agerwala, vice president, Systems, IBM Research. “Researchers, scientists, engineers and inventors can now ask more questions, test more theories, try more designs, and simulate more conditions than was ever possible before.” One of the first applications to be deployed will be Blue Matter, the software framework developed as part of the science effort within the Blue Gene project at IBM Research, which is used to run protein dynamics simulations for drug development.