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IBM's Supercomputer: a Million Processors

Wielding 2 million times a PC's power, Blue Gene tackles genetic mysteries.

By Stan Miastkowski, PCWorld   

The supercomputer has been dubbed "Blue Gene," based on its first major project, delving into the deep mysteries of genetics and the proteins that make up life.

The numbers are admittedly mind-boggling. Blue Gene will run at one petaflop--that's a million, billion operations per second, according to IBM. That will make Blue Gene about two million times more powerful than the fastest desktop PC. It's 1000 times more powerful than the "Deep Blue" computer that beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. And it's 500 times more powerful than the machine considered the world's fastest, a supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories used for government research.

IBM is taking a "radical new approach" to computer design, according to Dr. Ambuj Goyal, IBM's vice president for computer science. In order to deliver Blue Gene's power, IBM will use an architecture called SMASH, for Simple, Many, and Self-Healing.

Blue Gene will have one million processors, with 32 processors and memory each placed on a single chip and 64 chips placed on individual circuit boards. The final incarnation will consist of 2000 square feet of processor boards and the associated circuitry, running eight million simultaneous processing threads.

The speed of communications within Blue Gene would be fast enough to download the entire contents of the Internet in less than a second, according to Goyal. And because the problems that Blue Gene will work on require non-stop processing, the machine will be self-healing. It is designed to automatically sense and handle problems such as inoperative processors.

In the Genes

Blue Gene's first project will be the "Protein Folding" problem. This is the "secret to unlocking how our bodies work," says Dr. Paul Horn, senior vice president of IBM Research.

Amino acids in our cells fold themselves into proteins that are the basis of all body functions. The process isn't well understood, but if the folding isn't correct, it causes diseases and genetic defects. When Blue Gene starts working on the problem in four or five years, it's expected to take a full year of non-stop work to complete its computations.

Where could this research lead? Horn envisions a time when your doctor will scrape a culture from your mouth, have a computer analyze it, and then synthesize a drug that's tuned exactly for your personal DNA.

Beyond protein folding, IBM says Blue Gene will be able to model processes--such as the Big Bang and financial analysis--that are beyond the range of today's supercomputers.

Blue Gene's computing power distributed among its million processors makes it similar to the way that the human brain works, Horn says. Researchers say Blue Gene will be the first computer with processing power similar to that of the human brain. But Blue Gene is "just a computer," albeit an extremely powerful one, Horn warns. It "doesn't use artificial intelligence, and it doesn't think."