Blue Gene

On December 6, 1999, IBM announced a $100 million research initiative to build the world's fastest supercomputer. This machine, named Blue Gene™, will tackle fundamental problems in computational biology and in a variety of other applications. When built, the Blue Gene system, rated at more than one petaflop, will be capable of performing more than 1 million billion floating point operations per second. It will achieve this performance through a combination of massive parallelism (1 million processors) and new computer architecture approaches: the system will consist of thousands of identical chips, each containing multiple processors, memory components, and communication logic. Simultaneous multithreading will be used within each processor to hide memory latency and simplify microprocessor design.

The Blue Gene project tackles fundamental problems in computer architecture and large-scale system design, such as the use of integrated processor-memory logic, multithreading, cellular design for massively parallel systems, power management, error recovery, algorithms as well as programming models and tools for massively parallel computing. This is an ambitious, long-term research project that will drive new activities in computer science.

Blue Gene will be used initially to study the dynamics of protein folding. A protein consists of a string of amino acids that are joined like links of a chain. In the presence of water, a protein folds into a highly complex three-dimensional shape that plays a major role in determining its function. To understand how a protein folds into its specific shape, we are developing a molecular dynamics simulation model that is expected to shed significant light on this question. The computational requirements of such a simulation are far beyond the capabilities of current supercomputers and will require the level of performance provided by Blue Gene. In addition, the successful simulation of protein folding will require advances in the numerical modeling of molecular dynamics and in numerical algorithms.

IBM Research will collaborate with the academic community to apply the tremendous compute power of Blue Gene to accelerate progress in computational biology and medicine, as well as to explore other potential areas of application.

Please contact Paridhi Verma to obtain copies of the Computer Science Brochure