[TSgt]

Blue Gene is a computer architecture project to produce several supercomputers, designed to reach operating speeds in the PFLOPS (petaFLOPS) range, and currently reaching sustained speeds of nearly 500 TFLOPS (teraFLOPS). It is a cooperative project among IBM (particularly IBM Rochester and 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. There are four Blue Gene projects in development: Blue Gene/L, Blue Gene/C, Blue Gene/P, and Blue Gene/Q.



The Blue Gene/Q is a 4-way hyperthreaded 64-bit PowerPC A2 based chip with 16 cores. The chips will have integrated memory, I/O controllers and be mounted on a compute node card which also has 1 GB DDR3 RAM for each processor core.

[NormsRevenge]

double wide rack mount,, heavy duty stuff..

petaFLOPS , on any ‘puter is pretty impressive..

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thanks....found a Yahoo note:

US Commissions Beefy IBM Supercomputer

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Mira will have more than 750,000 IBM PowerPC A2 1.6 Ghz, 16-way SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) A2 processors. Each compute node will have a single processor, and they will be housed in racks of 1,024. Each compute rack will also have from eight to 128 I/O nodes -- also running the A2 processor -- that will be dedicated to moving data on and off the compute nodes.

Each node will have either 8 or 16 gigabytes of memory, aggregating to 750 terabytes of memory across the entire system. Communications among the nodes will go over IBM 5D Torus interconnects, capable of 40 gigabits-per-second throughput.

For an operating system, the compute nodes will run a Compute Node Lightweight open-source scalable kernel, and the I/O nodes and the front-end and service nodes will run a modified version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The system will be mostly water-cooled and consume an average of 60 kilowatts per rack.

IBM did not reveal the price for Mira, though it did say Argonne had purchased it with funds from a US$180 million grant.