IBM’s BlueGene/L machine is both the fastest and most expensive supercomputer ever built in the United States. It was built at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The supercomputer is built from 64 racks of Blue Gene servers, each of which contains 1,024 700MHz dual-core PowerPC processors.
Specifications listed on LLNL’s website about their BlueGene/L system
are as follows:
are as follows:
- 65,536 compute nodes, each targeted for 2.8 GFlop/s peak
- Chip multiprocessor with 4MB L3 cache on chip
- High-bandwidth low-latency 3D torus and combining tree networks
- 32 terabytes of memory
- High-performance kernel on compute nodes, Linux on I/O nodes
- Hardware support for Message Passing Interface collectives
BlueGene/L currently tops the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list with a Linpack performance benchmark of 280.6 TFlop/s.
IBM sells a single 1,024 processor BlueGene rack for approximately $2,000,000. The BlueGene/L supercomputer was built by IBM for the DoE along with the ASCI Purple supercomputer that benchmarks at 63.39 TFlop/s as part of a $290,000,000 contract. The supercomputers will both be used for nuclear weapons simulations.
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