Deep Blue's BIG little brother... Blue Gene.

[cyphen]

I would like to introduce you all to my next computer. IBM's designing and building it for me. It's called Blue Gene, and it's capable of a petaflop, or 1 quadrillion operations per second. This info is from the February issue of PC Magazine. It's main purpose will be modeling the folding of human protiens to help medical researchers understand disease and develop customized pharmaceuticals. Anyone else have any info on this? Here are the specs listed in PC Magazine:
High End Desktop PC: (slightly outdated but nobody's perfect, right?)
# of processors: 1
ops per second: 500,000,000
HW Computation threads: 1
size: 2 square feet (why they chose area over volume i don't know - maybe they don't have specs on Blue Gene's volume)
Deep Blue (the computer that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov)
# of processors: 500
ops per second: 1,000,000,000,000
HW computation threads: 500
size: 10 square feet
Blue Gene (my new computer!)
# of procesors: 1,000,000
ops per second: 1,000,000,000,000,000
HW Computation threads: 8,000,000
size: 2,000 sq. ft.
mommy, i want that for christmas!!!
I bet you'd get more than 150 fps in Quake 3!
So far as i can tell from this short article, this is still in the blueprint stages.

[Apostle 83]

For you? No, for me! And I only have to fork over 15.8 million once it reaches production stage (five years) and get clearance with the dod.

[deep_sky]

i wonder if it is overclockable.....

the os must be pain to deal with, with that much SMP going on....but i bet there is not going to be a graphics chipset that could take advantage of of the processors.....

would be nice to play with, but i dont have a desk big enough to hold it

[BBA]

I don't know...maybe you could SLI about 10 DDR GeForces. Think it'll drive all of them?

[oxOGradiusOxo]

Why worry about playing graphic driven games? Design yourself an RC5 client that could take advantage of all those processors, and BLAM! You'd have the thing cracked in less than a day.

[MAGIC 8-BALL and THE ELF]

My planet's "Palm Pilot" out does Blue Gene by 7 orders of magnitude. - 8-Ball

No wonder he hates using an overclocked PIII-800 when he's here! - Elf