IBM today said it would invest $100 million in Blue Gene, a supercomputer that will have 500 times the computing power of today's machines.
Blue Gene will be able to conduct more than one quadrillion operations per second - or one petaflop, according to IBM's research laboratories. That performance level will be reached in about five years, IBM says.
What will make reaching that performance level possible will be what IBM is calling a "radical new approach" to computer design and architecture. It is calling this architecture SMASH - which stands for Simple, Many and Self-Healing.
The technology will, for example, simplify the number of instructions carried out by each processor. That will enable the processor to work faster and with lower power and chip surface requirements, IBM says. The supercomputer will also be able to repair itself, fixing failures of individual processors and computing threads, IBM says.
Blue Gene will consist of more than one million processors, each capable of one billion floating point operations per second, or one gigaflop. The first project IBM intends to tackle with such a computer will be modeling how human proteins are folded, IBM says.
IBM: http://www.ibm.com/.
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