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IBM TOPS EARTH SIMULATOR, BOASTS WORLD'S FASTEST COMPUTER

IBM announced that an IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer has surpassed NEC's Earth Simulator in Japan to become the world's most powerful supercomputer. Using the industry-standard LINPACK benchmark, the IBM Blue Gene/L system attained a sustained performance of 36.01 Teraflops, eclipsing the three year old top mark of 35.86 Teraflops for the Japanese Earth Simulator in Yokohama, Japan. The milestone was attained during internal testing at IBM's production facility in Rochester, Minnesota.

Designed as a new approach to cost effective, ultra-powerful supercomputing, the BlueGene/L system is 1/100th the physical size (320 vs 32,500 square feet) and consumes 1/28th the power (216KW vs 6,000KW) as compared to the Earth Simulator. Yet, this is only a glimpse of Blue Gene/L's full potential. The largest planned Blue Gene/L machine, which is scheduled for delivery to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California in early 2005, will occupy 64 full racks, with a peak performance of 360 teraflops. The Advanced Super Computing (ASC) Program of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is a primary collaborator on the Blue Gene project. LLNL is operated for the NNSA by the University of California.

IBM's team of engineers and researchers continue to expand and test the system in anticipation of the upcoming publication of the Top500 Supercomputer list.

Here are further details about IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer project:

• 36.01 sustained Teraflops -- IBM Blue Gene L System - United States
• 35.86 sustained Teraflops -- Earth Simulator - Japan

IBM's BlueGene/L uses a large number of commercially available off-the-shelf processors; this offers a smaller and cooler supercomputer with lower costs.

Yet, this is only a glimpse of Blue Gene/L's full potential. The largest planned Blue Gene/L machine, which is being developed in collaboration with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, will occupying 64 full racks, with a peak performance of 360 teraflops. When completed in 2005, IBM expects this system to lead the Top500 supercomputer list. Compared to today's fastest supercomputers, it will be more than eight times faster, consume 1/15th the power per computation and be 10 times more compact.

Blue Gene/L is designed as a multipurpose system, drawing widespread interest. For instance, IBM is also working with ASTRON, a leading astronomical organization in the Netherlands, to build a 34 teraflop Blue Gene/L supercomputer. The Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has also announced that it has committed funding to acquire a Blue Gene/L system of its own. And university collaborators have flocked to Blue Gene/L 'user group' meetings at national lab sites, including a recent meeting at Argonne, in order to learn how to use the system in their research.

The Blue Gene/L prototype machines are roughly 1/20th the physical size of machines of comparable compute power that exist today -- such as Linux clusters. By making dramatic reductions in power consumption, cost and space requirements, IBM researchers are helping to turn massively parallel computing into an affordable, practical and accessible tool for science and industry.

"The U.S. computing industry is still alive and well, and still capable of dramatic innovation," said Dave Turek, Vice President of Deep Computing for IBM.

If IBM continues to beat the Japanese in the supercomputer speed contest, its other main concern will be competing with rival Cray Inc., the Seattle successor company to the former Minneapolis-based Cray Research.

The Blue Gene Family: The Future of Supercomputing

Blue Gene is an IBM supercomputing project with two overall goals: The first is to build a new family of supercomputers optimized for bandwidth, scalability and the ability to handle large amounts of data while consuming a fraction of the power and floor space required by today's fastest systems. The second is to use this computing platform to attack a broad range of challenging scientific and data analysis problems. Among the first applications IBM is exploring to harness Blue Gene's massive computing power is to model the folding of human proteins - a technique expected to give medical researchers better understanding of diseases, as well as potential cures.

In addition, ASTRON and IBM scientists plan to use IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer technology as the basis for a new type of radio telescope capable of looking back billions of years in time. This joint research project in high data volume supercomputing will help astronomers examine the beginnings of the earliest stars and galaxies after the formation of the universe, known as the Big Bang.

The architecture is proving to be readily adaptable to a range of applications, and will be more affordable than current supercomputing resources due to its smaller physical size and power efficiency. IBM and its partners are currently exploring a growing list of applications including hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, climate modeling and financial modeling.