 - Blue Gene is an experimental parallel processing supercomputer developed by IBM that employs thousands of processors, each of which demands minimal electric current. Blue Gene dissipates relatively little energy as heat in proportion to its computational power. For this reason, it is sometimes called Frost.
The Blue Gene architecture uses two processors on a chip. For example, 1024 Blue Gene nodes (2048 processors) can be configured in a single rack, demanding approximately 25 kilowatts (kW) of electricity. The fact that a large number of processors can be put into a small space translates into scalability as well as compactness. In proportion to its physical size, Blue Gene exhibits unprecedented computing speed. At the IBM facility in Rochester, New York, a Blue Gene system with 32,768 processors was ranked by the Top500 Supercomputer Sites as the fastest machine in the world.
Potential applications of Blue Gene include the simulation of complex processes and phenomena such as space flight, wildfire behavior, cloud formation, storm evolution, and the effects of human activity on the earth's climate.
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02 Dec 2005
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