IBM breaks the petaflop barrier

IBM RECKONS ITS new supercomputer, Blue Gene/P trebles the performance of its predecessor, the current fastest supercomputer in the world, Blue Gene/L.

The firm claims to have built a one-petaflop system with 294,912-processors in a 72-rack system, harnessed to a high-speed, optical network. It says the Blue Gene/P system design can be scaled up to an 884,736-processor, 216-rack cluster to deliver three petaflops.

One petaflop is one-quadrillion operations per second. IBM says the system 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.

Four IBM (850 MHz) PowerPC 450 processors are integrated on a single Blue Gene/P chip. Each chip is capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. A two-foot-by-two-foot board containing 32 of these chips churns out 435 billion operations every second, making it more powerful than a typical, 40-node cluster based on two-core commodity processors.

Thirty-two of the compact boards comprise the six-foot-high racks. Each rack runs at 13.9 trillion operations per second, 1,300 times faster than today's fastest home PC. µ

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Blue Gene