Subject: IBM unveils $100 million research initiative to build world's fastest supercomputer

From: Eugene Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 11:38:58 -0800 (PST)

http://www.ibm.com/news/1999/12/06.phtml

IBM unveils $100 million research initiative to build world's fastest
supercomputer

"Blue Gene" to tackle protein folding grand challenge 

On December 6, IBM announced a new $100 million exploratory research
initiative to build a supercomputer 500 times more powerful than the
world's fastest computers today.

The new computer -- nicknamed "Blue Gene" by IBM researchers -- will
be capable of more than one quadrillion operations per second (one
petaflop). This level of performance will make Blue Gene 1,000 times
more powerful than the Deep Blue machine that beat world chess
champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, and about 2 million times more
powerful than today's top desktop PCs.

Blue Gene's massive computing power will initially be used to model
the folding of human proteins, making this fundamental study of
biology the company's first computing "grand challenge" since the Deep
Blue experiment. Learning more about how proteins fold is expected to
give medical researchers better understanding of diseases, as well as
potential cures.

"This is exactly what IBM Research does best -- continuously placing
big, aggressive bets on technologies that change the future of
computing," said Dr. Paul M. Horn, senior vice president of IBM
Research. "In many ways, Deep Blue got a better job today -- if this
computer unlocks the mystery of how proteins fold, it will be an
important milestone in the future of medicine and healthcare."

Experimental new architecture key to petaflop performance

IBM Research believes a radical new approach to computer design and
architecture will allow Blue Gene to achieve petaflop-scale
performance in about five years -- one-third of the close to 15 years
it would normally take following Moore's Law. The two fastest
computers in the world today are part of the ASCI program run by the
U.S. Department of Energy, and which were recently tested at about 2
teraflops -- two trillion operations per second each.

"We think a tremendous gain in performance will be made possible by
the first major revolution in how computers are built since the
mid-1980s," said Dr. Ambuj Goyal, IBM Research's vice president of
computer science. "We call this new approach to computer architecture
SMASH, which stands for Simple, Many and Self-Healing."

The SMASH architecture differs from existing approaches in three ways:

It dramatically simplifies the number of instructions carried out by
each processor, allowing them to work faster and with significantly
lower power and chip surface requirements (the traditional approach is
to add complex features to gain performance); It will facilitate a
massively parallel system capable of more than 8 million simultaneous
threads of computation (compared to the maximum of 5000 threads
today); It will make the computer self-stabilizing and self-healing --
automatically able to overcome failures of individual processors and
computing threads.

Blue Gene will consist of more than one million processors, each
capable of one billion operations per second (1 gigaflop). Thirty-two
of these ultra-fast processors will be placed on a single chip (32
gigaflops). A compact two-foot by two-foot board containing 64 of
these chips will be capable of 2 teraflops, making it as powerful as
the 8000-square foot ASCI computers.

Eight of these boards will be placed in 6-foot-high racks (16
teraflops), and the final machine (less than 2000 sq. ft.) will
consist of 64 racks linked together to achieve the one petaflop
performance.

Protein folding holds key to understanding basics of life

The scientific community considers protein folding one of the most
significant "grand challenges" -- a fundamental problem in science or
engineering that has broad economic and scientific impact and whose
solution can be advanced only by applying high-performance computing
technologies.

Proteins control all cellular processes in the human body. Comprising
strings of amino acids that are joined like links of a chain, a
protein folds into a highly complex, three-dimensional shape that
determines its function. Any change in shape dramatically alters the
function of a protein, and even the slightest change in the folding
process can turn a desirable protein into a disease.

Better understanding of how proteins fold will give scientists and
doctors better insight into diseases and ways to combat
them. Pharmaceutical companies could design high-tech prescription
drugs customized to the specific needs of individual people. And
doctors could respond more rapidly to changes in bacteria and viruses
that cause them to become drug-resistant.

"Breakthroughs in computers and information technology are now
creating new frontiers in biology," said Horn. "One day, you're going
to be able to walk into a doctor's office and have a computer analyze
a tissue sample, identify the pathogen that ails you, and then
instantly prescribe a treatment best suited to your specific illness
and individual genetic makeup."

IBM Research

About 50 scientists from IBM Research's Deep Computing Institute and
Computational Biology Group will work on Blue Gene and the protein
folding grand challenge. IBM Research is the world's largest research
organization dedicated to information technology, with eight labs
around the world, including Austin, Beijing, Delhi, Haifa, Tokyo, San
Jose, Yorktown Heights (New York), and Zurich.