IBM Blue Gene/P world’s most powerful supercomputer

The new IBM Blue Gene/P Supercomputer is 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in one second than the combined power of a stack of laptop computers nearly 1.5 miles high.Blue Gene/P nearly triples the performance of its predecessor, Blue Gene/L — currently the world’s fastest computer — while remaining the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package ever built. IBM Blue Gene/P Supercomputer enables science and commercial supercomputing to attack vital problems in ways never before possible — modeling an entire human organ to determine drug interactions, for example. Drug researchers could run simulated clinical trials on 27 million patients in one afternoon using just a sliver of the machine’s full power. The Blue Gene supercomputer operating system is based on the open-source Linux operating system. Applications are written in common languages such as Fortran, C and C++ using standards-based MPI communications protocols.

The Blue Gene/P supercomputer can be configured to reach speeds in excess of three petaflops, a performance level that many thought unattainable only a few short years ago. The one-petaflop Blue Gene/P supercomputer configuration is a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical network. The Blue Gene/P system can be scaled to an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster to achieve three-petaflop performance. A standard Blue Gene/P supercomputer configuration will house 4,096 processors per rack.