The 50-person initiative, dubbed Blue Gene, will culminate in a computerthat can perform a quadrillion calculations per second, about a thousandtimes faster than the company's Deep Blue machine that beat world chess champion GarryKasparov two years ago and about 500 times faster than IBM's Blue Pacificnuclear weapons computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM said.
The Blue Gene program is the successor to Deep Blue: an initiative to pushIBM researchers faster in creating the software and hardware thatultimately will be useful for ordinary businesses as well as scientificresearchers needing the most powerful machines, said Paul Horn, senior vicepresident of IBM research at a news conference today.
But IBM will have to wrangle with others. Sun Microsystems, for example, has its eye on the supercomputermarket, a new area for the company. Sun is set to announce that the NavalOceanographic Office, a customerof Cray Research supercomputers from SGI, has bought three top-end E10000computers from Sun. The E10000 machines--which Sun originally acquired fromCray--have given Sun a significant presence on a list of the top 500 computers.
Blue Gene will take on the problem of protein folding, the biochemicalprocess by which complex molecules are constructed by instructions carriedin DNA. As proteins are assembled from components called amino acids, thelong strand of molecules twists and folds into a three-dimensional bundle,leaving some "active" sites protruding from the protein to react with theenvironment.
How exactly the protein will fold up is governed by basic rules of howatoms attract and repel each other, Horn said. But the size of proteins,often with thousands of atoms, makes predicting that arrangement a verydifficult task. Hemoglobin--also known as the red blood cells that carryoxygen throughout the body--is made of 600 amino acids, for example.
Blue Gene's final product, due in four or five years, will be able to"fold" a protein made of 300 amino acids, Horn said. But that job will takean entire year of full-time computing. In the meantime, IBM will producelesser computers and tackle simpler proteins, including some whosestructure already is known, Horn said.
The research will speed up the design of new drugs--theoretically evendrugs customized to individuals.
The computer will use a new architecture that has more than a million CPUsconnected in ever-larger bunches, said Ambuj Goyal, vice president ofcomputer science at IBM Research.
The chip itself will extend an IBM design philosophy that will emerge incoming years with IBM's Power4 processor. That processor will package four CPUs on a single chip, IBM hassaid.
Blue Gene will use 32 CPUs in a single chip, Goyal said. But in a newtwist, these chips will contain the computer memory as well, which intoday's computers it is completely separate from the CPUs. "We'll put memorytogether with processors, many packaged on the same chip. We'll get moremathematical calculations out of a chip than is traditionally possible," hesaid.
A total of 64 of those 32-CPU chips will be packaged in a computing node;then eight nodes will be stacked in each rack. Building 64 of these rackswill get IBM to its goal of a petaflop--a quadrillion "floating-point"mathematical operations per second.
The system will inherit some "self-healing" capability that IBM uses in itsS/390 supercomputer line, he added. That feature lets a computerautomatically detect and shut down faulty processors. This overall approachis called SMASH, which stands for "simply, many and self-healing."
The chips will understand a new language, or "instruction set," that'spared down to be as simple as possible. It's a step beyond thesimplification that took place when the industry moved from complexinstruction set computer (CISC) designs to reduced instruction setcomputers (="https: www.cnet.com="" resources="" info="" glossary="" terms="" risc.html"="">RISC), Goyal said.
IBM expects pharmaceutical companies and others to begin helping with theresearch, Horn said.
The computer itself will be housed at IBM's Watson research center inYorktown Heights, New York.