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IBM plans commercial supercomputer

William Pulleyblank, left, IBM's director of exploratory server systems, and researcher Shawn Hall are pictured with a Blue Gene/L prototype at the Thomas J. Watson Rearch Center in Yorktown, New York, last November. IBM is set to announce this week that it plans to sell a commercial model of the suptercomputer. PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Nearly five years ago, IBM embarked on an ambitious project to build a supercomputer, Blue Gene, to study protein-folding, a fundamental biological process. IBM regarded it as a custom research program, useful for testing computing concepts but not a potential product.

Later this week, IBM intends to announce its plans for a commercial version of the machine, Blue Gene/L. The company hopes to sell the machines, which would typically cost millions of dollars, to corporations that want vast amounts of computing power.

Potential customers include oil companies that use geologic simulations to hunt for oil and gas fields, investment banks doing financial market and risk calculations and pharmaceutical manufacturers simulating how new drugs might work.

The power of the technology IBM is bringing to the marketplace was expected to be underlined yesterday when the latest twice-a-year ranking of the world's 500 fastest computers was due to be published.

Two new Blue Gene/L prototype supercomputers are ranked in the top 10, as the fourth fastest and the eighth fastest.

More significant, the prototype machines represent a modest sampling of what the Blue Gene/L technology can do. The fastest supercomputers are usually vast racks of machinery, routinely described as requiring as much space as several tennis courts. The Blue Gene/L prototype machines are four refrigerator-sized consoles each.

A big Blue Gene/L machine that IBM is building for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory should be up and running next year.

According to IBM and Livermore scientists, that machine should be as much as nine times as fast and one-tenth the size of the fastest machine today, the NEC Earth Simulator, used for weather and earthquake simulations in a Japanese government laboratory.

The performance of the Blue Gene/L prototypes is "very impressive," said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee, who for years has maintained the authoritative list of 500 fastest computers.

The Blue Gene/L uses one-tenth or less of the power as most other supercomputer designs. Power consumption is an increasingly important issue in high-performance computing, because overheating adds to the cost of operation and degrades performance. Other major issues in supercomputing are floor space, peak performance, price and how to allot complex scientific applications across many thousands of microprocessors.

"With Blue Gene/L, IBM has addressed all these issues," said Michel McCoy, leader of the advanced simulation and computing program at the Livermore lab.
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