Blue Gene

Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.

The project created three generations of supercomputers, Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/P, and Blue Gene/Q. Blue Gene systems have often led the TOP500 and Green500 rankings of the most powerful and most power efficient supercomputers, respectively. Blue Gene systems have also consistently scored top positions in the Graph500 list. The project was awarded the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

History

In December 1999, IBM announced a US$100 million research initiative for a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding. The project had two main goals: to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large-scale simulation, and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software. Major areas of investigation included: how to use this novel platform to effectively meet its scientific goals, how to make such massively parallel machines more usable, and how to achieve performance targets at a reasonable cost, through novel machine architectures. The initial design for Blue Gene was based on an early version of the Cyclops64 architecture, designed by Monty Denneau. The initial research and development work was pursued at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and led by William R. Pulleyblank.