Blue Gene

Blue Gene is a computer architecture project designed to produce several next-generation supercomputers, operating in the PFLOPS range. It is a cooperative project between the United States Department of Defense (who are funding the project), industry (IBM in particular), and academia. There are five Blue Gene projects in development, among them Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/C, and Blue Gene/P.

Blue Gene/L

The first computer in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/L, developed through a partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cost $100 million and is intended to scale to speeds in the hundreds of TFLOPS, with a theoretical peak performance of 360 TFLOPS. This is almost ten times as fast as the Earth Simulator, the fastest supercomputer in the world before Blue Gene. Two Blue Gene/L prototypes have entered the TOP500 Supercomputer List at the #4 and #8 positions.

On September 29, 2004, IBM announced that a Blue Gene/L prototype at IBM Rochester, MN had overtaken NEC's Earth Simulator as the fastest computer in the world, with a speed of 36.01 TFLOPS, beating Earth Simulator's 35.86 TFLOPS. The machine later reached a speed of 70.72 TFLOPS.

On March 24, 2005, the US Department of Energy announced that Blue Gene/L broke its current world speed record, reaching 135.5 TFLOPS (1 TFLOP = 1 trillion calculations per second). This feat was possible because of the doubling number of current racks to 32 with each rack holding 1,024 processors. This is still only half of the final configuration's 65,536 processors.

Blue Gene/L will have a total of 65,536 compute processors (i.e., 64K processors) and 1024 I/O processors. The I/O processors will use the Linux operating system. Each processor will be attached to four parallel communications networks: a 3D toroidal network for peer-to-peer communication, a tree network for collective communication, a global interrupt network for fast barriers, and an Ethernet network for booting and diagnostics.

With so many nodes, components will be failing frequently. Thus, the system will be able to electrically isolate faulty hardware to allow the machine to continue to run.

In public relations terms, it is being positioned as the successor of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer; however it bears little architectural resemblance to Deep Blue.

Blue Gene/C

The purpose of the Blue Gene/C (also known as the Cyclops64 architecture) is to design a cellular architecture -based supercomputer. Each "cell" consists of several dozen (approximately 75) custom designed 64-bit processors. Each processor will have two thread units, two integer units, and a floating point unit. The architecture was conceived by Cray award winner Monty Denneau , who is currently leading the project. Verification testing and system software development is being done at the University of Delaware.

Design is expected to be completed in June 2005, and fabrication should take approximately two months.

There are no plans to release any final performance results.

Blue Gene/P

IBM currently plans to finish Blue Gene/P in 2006. Blue Gene/P is expected to be the first supercomputer to break 1 petaflop, or 1 quadrillion operations per second.

Blue Gene/Q

The last known supercomputer in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/Q is expected to reach 3 petaflops.

Other meanings

• 'Blue' Gene Tyranny is a musician.

External links

• IBM Research: Blue Gene
• CNET story: It's Linux for IBM supercomputer project
• More detailed presentation of Blue Gene architecture (in pdf format)
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: BlueGene/L
• A technical description of the Cyclops64 architecture and system software (Gzipped postscript file)
• TOP500: Systems Under Development