Oak Ridge National Laboratory and IBM to collaborate on next generation computersOak Ridge 23 August 2001 IBM and the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory will collaborative. At the heart of the agreement is IBM's Blue Gene research project, which combines advanced protein science with IBM's next-generation cellular architecture supercomputer design.
Unlike today's computers, cellular servers will run on chips containing "cells,"
processors that contain memory and communications circuits. Cellular
architecture will help scale computer performance from teraflops (1 trillion
calculations per second) to petaflops (1,000 trillion calculations per second).
That kind of computing power has incredible implications for studying climate,
advancing the field of nanotechnology and gaining a better understanding of gene
sequences and how folding of proteins relates to diseases.
"Proteins control all processes occurring in the cells of the body," said Joe
Jasinski, manager, Computational Biology Center for IBM Research. "These
proteins are made up of a vast array of different combinations of amino acids
that fold and bend into very complex three-dimensional shapes that determine the
exact function of each protein.
IBM and ORNL hope to use this enormous computing power to explore numerous other
areas as well. This effort merely represents the beginning of what is expected
to be a long relationship.
Because the project is a collaboration of ORNL's Life Sciences and Computer
Science and Mathematics divisions and IBM, it draws from a sizeable pool of
resources. The project also provides ORNL with new challenges.
Indeed, before it is possible to solve problems in biology, climate and
nanotechnology, scientists have to devise methods to run applications that use
tens of thousands of processors in the Blue Gene supercomputer. Each processor
forms a cell with memory, communication and input/output built in. This approach
departs from past designs and offers a glimpse of what's to come in
high-performance computing.
Funding for the CRADA is being provided by DOE and IBM. ORNL is a DOE
multiprogram facility operated by UT-Battelle. IBM Research is the world's
largest information technology research organization with more than 3,000
scientists and engineers at eight labs in six countries.
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