IBM announced a new revision of its Blue Gene supercomputers last week, the Blue Gene/P. The current revision, the Blue Gene/L, owned by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is currently the world's most powerful supercomputer, with 131,072 700MHz IBM PowerPC 440 processors for a total processing power of 280 teraFLOPs, or 280 trillion floating point operations per second. The average consumer desktop PC can do about 3 gigaFLOPs, or 3 billion operations per second. So the older Blue Gene/L is about 140,000 times more powerful than that box sitting under your desk. Blue Gene/P on the other hand, is fully capable of pushing 1 petaFLOP! 1 QUADRILLION operations per second.
That's a 1 with 15 zeros. Three times more powerful than the current most powerful supercomputer on the planet. And IBM has already released plans for an alternate configuration capable of 3 petaFLOPs! The petaFLOP version of the Blue Gene/P has 294,912 850mhz IBM PowerPC 450 processors. The 3 petaFLOP version has 884,736 of the same 850 mhz processors. The Blue Gene/P is also at least seven times more energy efficient than any other current supercomputer, according to IBM. The first Blue Gene/P system will be used by the US Dept of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, right here in the great state of Illinois.
source: Dailytech
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