IBM Announces $100 Million Research Initiative to Build World’s Fastest Supercomputer
Blue Gene” to Tackle Protein Folding Grand Challenge
YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY (December 06, 1999) – IBM today announced a new $100 million exploratory research initiative to build a supercomputer 500 times more powerful than the world’s fastest computers today.
The new computer — nicknamed “Blue Gene” by IBM researchers — will be capable of more than one quadrillion operations per second (one petaflop). This level of performance will make Blue Gene 1,000 times more powerful than the Deep Blue machine that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, and about 2 million times more powerful than today’s top desktop PCs.
Blue Gene’s massive computing power will initially be used to model the folding of human proteins, making this fundamental study of biology the company’s first computing “grand challenge” since the Deep Blue experiment. Learning more about how proteins fold is expected to give medical researchers better understanding of diseases, as well as potential cures.
“This is exactly what IBM Research does best — continuously placing big, aggressive bets on technologies that change the future of computing,” said Dr. Paul M. Horn, senior vice president of IBM Research. “In many ways, Deep Blue got a better job today — if this computer unlocks the mystery of how proteins fold, it will be an important milestone in the future of medicine and healthcare.”
Experimental New Architecture Key to Petaflop Performance
IBM Research believes a radical new approach to computer design and architecture will allow Blue Gene to achieve petaflop-scale performance in about five years — one-third of the close to 15 years it would normally take following Moore’s Law. The two fastest computers in the world today are part of the ASCI program run by the U.S. Department of Energy, and which were recently tested at about 2 teraflops — two trillion operations per second each.
“We think a tremendous gain in performance will be made possible by the first major revolution in how computers are built since the mid-1980s,” said Dr. Ambuj Goyal, IBM Research’s vice president of computer science. “We call this new approach to computer architecture SMASH, which stands for Simple, Many and Self-Healing.”
Source: IBM