It’s only fair that after talking about Apple’s new supercluster that I mention IBM’s.
IBM’s $100 million Blue Gene program is directed at creating, by late 2005 or early 2006, a new family of supercomputers that will be able to perform a quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop).
Blue Gene/L, the first member of the family, will contain 65,000 processors and 16 trillion bytes of memory. Due in 2004 or 2005, the system will be able to perform 200 trillion calculations per second. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will use the system for performing nuclear weapons simulations.
Now keep in mind that the Virginia Tech supercluster is aiming for 10TeraFlop (10 trillion calculations per second), this IBM supercluster will be 20 times faster.
This latest build out by IBM in the Blue Gene family is working towards a supercluster that will simulate Protein Synthesis. Protein Synthesis is the process in your cells where the DNA splits and is mapped via RNA to produce new cells. One of the most fundamental processes in your body. Why is this important? Let me explain.
The recent push/hype to map the Human Genome by the Biotech companies is part of a two pronged plan. First step, figure out what causes Parkinson’s/MS/etc.. Second step cure them. In order to cure a genetic trait you need a retro-virus that will carry the “cure” DNA sequences and infect the cells in your body. In order to build these retro-viruses we need to understand protein-synthesis. I get chills just thinking about it.
Read the whole article on ZDNet.