Armonk, N.Y. – International Business Machines Corp. introduced a new version of its Blue Gene supercomputer Tuesday that is three times faster than the previous model and consumes 20 percent more energy.
The Blue Gene/P, which can do 1 million billion calculations per second, is about 100,000 times more powerful than a home computer, IBM said Monday in an e-mailed statement.
Supercomputers break down complex tasks, such as mapping seismic activity or designing materials, into small calculations that are processed simultaneously. IBM, the world’s biggest computer-services company, has built almost half of the 500 fastest supercomputers, and its previous Blue Gene/L computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the fastest, according to a list compiled by scientists.
“There’s a computational arms race going on,” David Turek, a vice president for IBM’s Deep Computing group, said Monday. “This technology is a signpost for what the computing future is all about.”
