The Blue Gene/P works at operating speeds of over 1,000 trillion calculations per second. (1 PetaFlops)

Making it around three times more powerful than the Supercomputer which recently simulated half a Mouse Brain - the Blue Gene/L

This equates to being roughly 100,000 times more powerful than the most powerful PC on the market today. The US government have snapped up the first one which will be installed in a high tech laboratory in Illinois later this year.

L vs P

The Blue Gene/L packed 131,072 processors the Blue Gene/P has 294,912 connected by a high-speed optical network.
However the ‘P’ has the ability to be expanded to allow for over 800,000 processors which give it the ability to compute 3,000 trillion calculations per second (three petaflops)

“Blue Gene/P marks the evolution of the most powerful supercomputing platform the world has ever known,” said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing, IBM.

Playstation 3 Cell Processor

The same company are working on a Prototype Supercomputer, code named “Road Runner” which will use less processors but be more powerful.

The computer will contain 16,000 standard processors working alongside 16,000 “cell” processors, designed for the PlayStation 3 (PS3).

Each cell chip consists of eight processors controlled by a master unit that can assign tasks to each member of the processing team. Each cell is capable of 256 billion calculations per second. The road runner will be estimated at speeds of around 1.6 Petaflops.

Related Articles

• 14.09.07: Microsoft updating Windows without User consent (0)
• 04.01.08: Forget Lithium-Ion, think Silver-Zinc batteries (0)
• 16.11.07: Can the PS3 really play HD-DVD's? (6)
• 21.02.08: Redtacton turns the human body into one big swipe card (0)
• 24.08.07: Digital Boom (0)