The Most Powerful Computer

The Blue Gene is a computer proyect devolpet by IBM to produce the next-generation of supercomputers, currently resching speeds over 280 teraflops. There are five Blue Gene projects in devolopment.

It is a cooperative project among IBM, particularly the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the United States Department of Energy (which is partially funding the project) and academia.

This Supercomputer is anuncet on September 29, 2004 with a simulator as the fastest at IBM devolpet. The machine reached a speed of 70.72 TFLOPS by November.

On March 24, 2005, the US Department of Energy announced that the Blue Gene/L installation at LLNL broke its current world speed record, reaching 135.5 TFLOPS. This feat was possible because of doubling the number of cabinets to 32.

On the June 2005 Top500 list, Blue Gene/L installations across several sites world-wide took 5 out of the 10 top positions, and 16 out of the top 64.

On October 27, 2005, LLNL and IBM announced that Blue Gene/L had once again broken its current world speed record, reaching 280.6 TFLOPS, upon reaching its final configuration of 65,536 "Compute Nodes" (i.e., 216 nodes) and an additional 1024 "IO nodes" in 64 air-cooled cabinets.
BlueGene/L is also the first supercomputer ever to run over 100 TFLOPS sustained on a real world application, namely a three-dimensional molecular dynamics code (ddcMD), simulating solidification (nucleation and growth processes) of molten metal under high pressure and temperature conditions. This won the 2005 Gordon Bell Prize.