IBM claims new supercomputer hits three petaflops

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IBM claims it has tripled the speed of the world's fastest supercomputer.

The company's last effort, the Blue Gene/L, was named the fastest supercomputer in the world earlier this week for the third year in a row, claiming the number one spot on the Top500 list at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, for a system based in California running at 280 teraflops.

The new Blue Gene/P is designed to operate continuously at one petaflop, but IBM claims it can be configured to top three petaflops.

"Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM, in a statement.

The Blue Gene/P is based on racks which can be added to as necessary to expand its power. Each chip features four IBM 850 MHz processors, capable of 13.6 billion operations per second. Each six-foot rack, which has 32 boards with 32 chips, can run 13.9 trillion operations per second.

In order to get a petaflop, it would require 72 racks on a high-speed network. Increasing the power to three teraflops will take a 216-rack cluster.

IBM isn't just claiming breakthrough speeds for the Blue Gene, but said that the new version is seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer. The new Blue Gene will also feature programming and software upgrades.

The advances in energy efficiency and simplified programming means such high performance computing may be of interest to more commercial users, rather than research, Turek said.

"A new group of commercial users will be able to take advantage of its new, simplified programming environment and unrivaled energy efficiency," said Turek. "We see commercial interest in Blue Gene developing now in energy and finance, for example. This is on course with an adoption cycle -- from government labs to leading enterprises - that we've seen before in the high-performance computing market."

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