IBM Plans Superfast (Amino) Acid-Washed Blue Gene
(12/13/99; 9:00 a.m. ET)
OPINION
By Jeffrey R. Harrow, TechWeb contributor
I can only describe IBM's plans to create a million-CPU supercomputer -- which promises to break quite a bit of new ground -- as bleeding-edge.
For example, each processor chip contains 32 complete processors, which are special 57-instruction (vs. typically 200-instruction) RISC
processors. Each board will contain
64 of these chips, and each of 64 towers will contain eight boards. Do the
math -- that's a lot of processors. And unlike most computers today,
this computer's memory will reside on the same chips as the processors,
dramatically speeding up memory access.
This behemoth, which will use six gallons of water every second for
cooling, will chug out calculations 500 times faster than today's
supercomputer kings -- a petaflop, or a thousand-trillion floating
operations per second. Remember those huge numbers you used to toss around as a kid? Well, you can now use 'em and mean 'em: This is a quadrillion operations
each and every second.
Trying to put this into terms that mean something to mere mortals, the
Dec. 6 New York Times said if a fast contemporary PC were 1 inch tall, this computer would stretch 20 miles high. In fact, they expect it to work, according to the Dec. 6 Edupage, at the "speed of life." Edupage is an e-mail newsletter produced by Educause, a nonprofit association dedicated to
transforming education through information technologies.
That's because the goal of this five-year, $100 million computer is to
work with data derived from the human genome project to simulate how
amino acids turn into proteins -- a process key to how our bodies work.
This computer is called "Blue Gene," and some expect that pushing
computing limits in this direction will generate lots of very positive
fallout, helping advance other simulation work long before it ever
reaches its ultimate goal.
The field is called "computational biology," and this is a good example
of how bleeding-edge computers, plus gifted researchers and vision,
hold the potential to change our world.
Of course, nature still has the upper hand. Blue Gene should take
about a year to simulate the folding of amino acids into one protein --
something our bodies do many times a day, in less than a second. 
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Jeffrey Harrow is a senior consulting engineer for the corporate
strategy and technology group at Compaq. A more extensive version of this discussion, as well as other discussions about the innovations and trends of contemporary computing, are available
online.
His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Compaq.
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