IBM has announced its newest supercomputer, 'Blue Gene/P', successor to its Blue Gene/L। IBM claims 'Blue Gene/P' almost triples the peformance of its predecessor, while remaining the most energy-efficient and space-saving package ever built.
The super new system is engineered to operate at speeds exceeding 1 petaflop operations per second, IBM said. The 'Blue Gene/P' design comprises several low-power chips, connected together by five specialized networks. The supercomputer is described by IBM as a 294,912-processor, 72-rack system harnessed to a high-speed, optical -- not InfiniBand -- network, with a new SMP mode that supports multi-threaded applications। Later this year, the first 'Blue Gene/P' will be deployed by the US Dept of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory। Meanwhile, IBM has found a competitor in Sun Microsystems, which has also announced its 'Constellation' supercomputer। Sun claims 'Constellation' has surpassed the 1 petaflop mark. 'Constellation' comes with a memory of 52.6TB with 105TB RAM, backed-up by a disk space of 1.73PB. The supercomputer would need 3 megawatts of power to run, and a standard rack that holds 768 cores. The first 'Constellation' machine named 'Ranger' will be installed at the University of Texas at Austin, and will run at 500 teraflops
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