Blue Gene, IBM

Blue Gene is one of the very largest supercomputers currently in development. It is planned that this computer will operate at over 1 Petaflops (one million billion operations per second). This is ~100 times more powerful than ASCI White, the largest computer in operation today.

Architecture:
Blue gene will be built using what is known as the SMASH architecture. This stand for "simple, many, and self-healing". Each processor will be of a very simple design and capable of operating at 1 gigaflop (a billion operations per second). There will then be 32 of these processors placed on a single chip. Over 32,000 of these chips will go to make up the complete computer. This makes a total of around a million processors operating in parallel.

Schedule:
The proposal to build Blue Gene was announced 06.Dec.1999. The project will last 5 years with the computer becoming fully operational in 2005. The computer derives its name from its principle intended purpose, i.e. to model the folding of human proteins. The development project will cost $100 million and employ 50 scientists at the IBM Deep Computing Institute.

Links:
IBM Research: www.research.ibm.com/bluegene