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IBM supercomputer gets pushed back a year as commercial machines prioritized

IBM Corp is putting off by a year completion of its most powerful supercomputer, designed for drug research, so it can build interim machines aimed at broader commercial uses.

IBM enlisted the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to help design an interim machine that will be 15 times more powerful than the fastest supercomputer. IBM hopes to find a partner to adapt the machine for managing corporate databases, said William Pulleyblank, IBM's director of deep computing.

The largest computer maker wants its US$100 million, five-year investment in a machine called Blue Gene to start paying off in commercial fields beyond drug research. Blue Gene, now expected to be completed in 2006, would use a new computing design to run 1 quadrillion calculations per second, or about 80 times faster than today's top machine.

"The Blue Gene project is being expanded to attack a much broader range of problems," Pulleyblank said in an interview.

"We're trying to see how far we can take the technology."

IBM, based in Armonk, New York, had said it couldn't build Blue Gene on its own. It will work with the US Department of Energy's Livermore Lab to design an interim machine called Blue Gene/L.

Livermore scientists want the computer to simulate nuclear weapon blasts and the aging of bomb components, said Livermore spokesman David Schwoegler. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

IBM shares fell US$0.04 cents to US$113.81 yesterday and are up 34 percent this year.

IBM said today that it sold a supercomputer to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. The US$24 million system will eventually let scientists studying long-term climate change conduct 50 simultaneous, century-long simulations compared with one today.

The machine is to be installed next year. If operating today, it would rank as the second-most-powerful supercomputer in the world, capable of nearly 7 trillion operations per second.

A prototype of Blue Gene/L is due in 2003, with final delivery in 2004, Pulleyblank said. The larger Blue Gene machine, designed to model the folding of proteins so biochemists can tailor drugs to ailments, is planned for 2006, he said.

IBM announced Blue Gene in late 1999 and originally hoped to complete it in 2005.

It isn't surprising that a project as big as Blue Gene is extended for a year, said Christopher Willard, a high-performance computing analyst with International Data Corp. IBM apparently sees broader applications for the kind of supercomputer it envisions and wants to exploit it fully, he said.

"IBM being IBM, once they find a market for something, it generates a lot of interest," Willard said.
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