Blue Horizon, San Diego

Blue Horizon, whilst "only" the 10th fastest supercomputer in the world, it is the fastest which is available for academic research in the USA. The computer is capable of operating at a maximum speed of 1.02 Teraflops (trillions of operations per second).

Built by IBM this computer is located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and first came into full production operation March 1st, 2000. The hardware consists of 1152 processors. Each processor runs at 222Mhz and they are grouped into nodes of 8 processors per node. Each node is able to access 4Gb of RAM, this gives a total memory of 576Gb. The processors used are IBM's Power3 processor, the same as was used in the Deep Blue computer which beat Gary Kasparov at chess. These are 64 bit RISC processors constructed using 0.25 micron lithography.

This huge computer, which cost over $50 million to build, is contained in 42 cabinets which occupy a total of 1,500 square feet. The operating system used is AIX, this is IBM's own version of UNIX.

The computer will be used for a whole range of academic purposes including simulation of bio-molecules, climatology, and the growth of semiconductors and nanotubes. Most interestingly it will also be used for simulations of the human nervous system, although there are no further details on this yet.

Links:
Blue Horizon: http://www.sdsc.edu/Resources/bluehorizon.html