IBM to commercialize Blue Gene supercomputer

IDG News Service - Fresh from setting a record for performance among supercomputers just a few days ago, IBM today announced that it is making a commercial version of its Blue Gene system available for businesses and scientific researchers.
Called the IBM eServer Blue Gene, the Power-based system uses a mix of cooling and clustering technologies to achieve a performance of 5.7 trillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). The system, which has a footprint of less than one square meter, is available now and starts at $1.5 million.Users will also be able rent the system from one of IBM's Deep Computing On Demand centers in the U.S. or Europe, a spokesman said.
"We think this system will allow us to introduce a new class of high-performance computing capability to industry-specific businesses and allow our clients to deliver better optimized functionality," said Colin Parris, vice president with IBM's eServer Product Management group.
Parris said his company is actively working with a number of industry business partners to find the best way to deliver Blue Gene's capabilities in "key marketplaces."
IBM has been working with partners over the past few years to make Blue Gene applicable for a variety of computing workloads. IBM and a large number of national testing labs and universities are working on a list of high-performance computing applications for Blue Gene in the areas of life sciences, financial modeling, hydrodynamics, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, astronomy and climate modeling.
The company is also looking at more commercial applications of the system involving grid computing, business intelligence, manufacturing processes and risk and compliance, company officials said.
The new system will be available in configurations ranging anywhere from one to 64 racks. Partially populated racks with less than 1,024 nodes will also be available, a company spokesman said.
Blue Gene was created as a result of a five-year project that cost $100 million in research alone. It started life as a research tool for protein-folding studies.