Blue Gene

Blue Gene is an IBM Research project dedicated to exploring the frontiers in supercomputing: in computer architecture, in the software required to program and control massively parallel systems, and in the use of computation to advance our understanding of important biological processes such as protein folding.

Vijay Pande July 2004 ''We're in pretty close contact with the Blue Gene team and have even written a paper together. In the end, it's likely that FAH will have more computational power than Blue Gene (so the Blue Gene team tells me), but of course they'll have a much faster network.''

Thus, the two (BG vs FAH) should be pretty complementary and we're working on ways of combining both to do things that would be impossible any other way.

Note that the TFLOPS reported for Blue Gene are acheived using the Linpack benchmark. From the specs of the Blue Gene/L machines, it is unlikely that it would be able to match the performance of on a folding simulation, in fact it would probably be significantly slower. The only way to know for sure is to wait until IBM release a paper on running folding type simulation on Blue Gene.

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