Into the Wide Blue Yonder with BlueGene/L

摘要

New vistas in numerical simulations are opening to scientists at Livermore and elsewhere with the arrival of the BlueGcrie/L supercomputer, a new class of highly scalable platform. IBM Research designed BlueGene/L for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program, a part of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Last November, BlueGene/L's first segment—one-fourth the size of the ultimate machine—captured the number-one spot on the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers (www.top500.org/lists/2004/11/), clocking in at 70.72 trillion operations per second (teraops) on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark. It beat the previous record holder, Japan's Earth Simulator, by a factor of two.