IBM Claims Lead In SupercomputingIBM Claims Lead In Supercomputing

IBM's disclosure last week that it has built the world's fastest supercomputer restores to the United States a technical lead it lost to Japan in 2002, and could signal an era of computer design in which efficiency is key to solving scientific and business problems.

Blue Gene/L, a supercomputer IBM is expected to deliver to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory next year, achieved a sustained performance of 36.01 trillion calculations per second, or teraflops, surpassing the previous record of 35.86 teraflops reached by NEC Corp.'s Earth Simulator machine. Blue Gene set the mark running test software called Linpack, which solves a set of complicated mathematical equations.

Reclaiming the lead in supercomputing performance could attract more funding for technical and scientific research in the United States. IBM's achievement shows that "the U.S. computing industry is still alive and well, and still capable of dramatic innovation," says Dave Turek, VP of IBM's high-performance computing division.

In addition to Lawrence Livermore, IBM is supplying early Blue Gene systems to a Japanese biology lab and a Dutch astronomy lab. The system also will have commercial applications in the petroleum and pharmaceuticals industries. What sets Blue Gene apart from the Earth Simulator is its use of a large number of relatively slow processors, combined with super-fast shuttling of data around the machine: The record-setting IBM prototype has 16,000 processors but draws just 1/28th the power of NEC's system. Blue Gene's design also could yield better performance than supercomputer clusters built from hundreds or thousands of PCs.

Supercomputer company Cray Inc. is staking out similar territory. The company this week plans to ship a low-cost machine based on technology from OctigaBay Systems Corp., which it acquired this year. Cray's XD1, which starts at $100,000, can deliver 40% better performance on a weather simulation program than a comparably priced cluster, says VP of marketing Adam Lorant.

At the high end of the market, Cray's Red Storm system, running at Sandia National Laboratory, is expected to challenge Blue Gene/L's record result.