IBM powers up prototype of its Blue Gene supercomputer

IBM has developed the first prototype of its Blue Gene/L supercomputer, a machine the size of a 30-inch television that is capable of calculating up to two trillion operations per second.

Even though it occupies only one cubic metre - half a rack of server space, compared to its peers that occupy over 12 racks - the system has been ranked as the 73rd most powerful computer in the world.

IBM has not disclosed details of a possible commercial release, but the prototype's small size and advanced air cooling system make it extremely practical for corporate datacentres or research facilities.

Most high-performance systems are water-cooled due to the heat generated by the quantity of processors, but IBM's new design makes a compromise between energy consumption and processing speed that resulted in the computer consuming no more power than the average home.

The prototype is a forerunner to Blue Gene/L, which will be 128 times larger and six times faster, but will consume only one fifteenth of the power per computation and one tenth of the floor space of today's fastest supercomputers.

The 360 trillion operations per second machine, due for completion by early 2005, will be employed to model the folding of human proteins and other computationally intensive tasks.

'Blue Gene's entry marks a fracture in the history of supercomputing, and will revolutionise the way supercomputers and servers are built and broaden the kinds of applications we can run on them,' said William Pulleyblank, director of exploratory server systems at IBM Research.