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Technology Stocks : Son of SAN - Storage Networking Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe Wagner who wrote (3902)	8/23/2001 2:06:00 AM
From: Gus	Respond to of 4808

A quadrillion calculations per second Blue Gene is 1,000x faster than Deep Blue, the supercomputer that beat Gary Kasparov in chess. Yet it will take still Blue Gene ONE YEAR to simulate ONE SECOND of the basic protein-folding process. ......To build such a revolutionary machine, IBM researchers have devised a new computer achitecture, which they call "Simple, Many, and Self-Healing", or SMASH for short. SMASH relies on an established processor design called RS/6000, which uses a very small and simple RISC instruction set – there are only 57 different instructions the processor can run. Each Blue Gene chip will have 32 processors onboard, and there'll be 64 chips on each of the machine's two-foot square motherboards. Then, there'll be a stack of eight motherboards, in a vertical tower. And there'll be 64 towers. The figures, when you tot them up, are amazing: each motherboard hosts 2048 processors – making a total of over a million. The operating system will be a flavour of Unix, and the machine will be able to support over 8 million separate simultaneously parallel "threads" of computation. The $100 million machine will occupy 160 square feet of floor space at IBM's Watson Laboratories in Yorktown Heights, New York. It should be ready by 2005..... cs.man.ac.uk