IBM Blue Gene/P - the world’s fastest computer

Not only have the IBM boffins come up with a faster super computer which can operate at speeds over 3 Petaflops but it uses less power than it’s predecessor. The latest generation of IBM super computer, the Blue Gene/P, was announced on Tuesday and here’s the blurb from IBM

It [The Blue Gene/P] enables science and commercial supercomputing to attack vital problems in ways never before possible — modeling an entire human organ to determine drug interactions, for example. Drug researchers could run simulated clinical trials on 27 million patients in one afternoon using just a sliver of the machine’s full power.

Apparently it’s 100,000 times more powerful than a home PC and can process more operations in a second than a pile of laptops over a mile high - I hoped they physically checked that last stat :)

And it’s nice to see the boffins being a bit green too by making the computer ‘at least seven times more energy efficient than any other supercomputer’. Although they don’t go into details on this I’m guessing I won’t be able to run it using a solar panel!

In case you’re wondering ‘what ever next?’, it’s the Blue Gene/Q which will run at up to 10 PetaFlops.

Source: DailyTech