The Blue Gene reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Blue Gene

Blue Gene is an IBM supercomputer project intended to be the largest supercomputer in the world. Costing $100M, the first computer in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/L, is intended to have a total of 65,536 processors and scale to speeds in the hundreds of teraflops, with a peak performance of 360 teraflops, according to IBM. This is almost ten times as fast as the Earth Simulator, the world's current fastest supercomputer. Two Blue Gene/L prototypes have entered the Top 500 Supercomputer List at the #4 and #8 positions.

The Blue Gene computer architecture is designed to scale to speeds of up to one petaflops.

In public relations terms, it is being positioned as the successor of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer, however it bears little architectural resemblance to Deep Blue.

Some of the nodes will use the Linux operating system. Each processor will be attached to three parallel communications networks: a 3D toroidal network for peer-to-peer communication, a tree network for collective communication, and an Ethernet network for booting and diagnostics.

With so many nodes, components will be failing frequently. Thus, the system will be able to electrically isolate faulty hardware to allow the machine to continue to run.

External links

• IBM Research: Blue Gene
• CNET story: It's Linux for IBM supercomputer project
• More detailed presentation of Blue Gene architecture (in pdf format)
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: BlueGene/L

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See: 'Blue' Gene Tyranny

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