Sponsored by:
IEEE TCCA, IEEE TCPP, ACM SIGARCH, & IFIP Working Group 10.3
& Generous Corporate Support from
Intel, SGI, & IBM
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Keynote Speaker: Monty Denneau, IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
Title: The Blue Gene Parallel Supercomputer - Calculating at the Speed of Life
Abstract: Capable of one quadrillion double precision floating-point operations per second, the Blue Gene supercomputer will be used to simulate from first principles the folding of a protein. This calculation requires on the order of 30 sextillion operations and will run for about one year. The machine is being built in the spirit of aggressive simplicity: the instruction set has almost no instructions, each of the 8,000,000 hardware thread units has almost no hardware, and there is only a single part, replicated 32,000 times. We cheerfully accept and use partially good chips. Breaking with traditional packaging, Blue Gene is just 18 inches high, and you can walk on it. This talk will cover the architecture and design of Blue Gene, along with some discussion of appropriate applications.
Dr. Monty Denneau is the system architect for the Blue Gene computer.
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