In December 1999, IBM announced the start of a five year effort to build a massively parallel computer to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding. The project has two main goals: advancing our understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large scale simulation and exploring novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software. This project should enable biomolecular simulations that are orders of magnitude larger than current technology permits. Major areas of investigation include: How to most effectively utilize this novel platform to meet our scientific goals. How to make such massively parallel machines more usable.
How to achieve performance targets with reasonable cost through novel machine architectures. This paper provides an overview of the Blue Gene project at IBM Research including some of the plans that have been made, the intended goals, and anticipated challenges regarding the scientific work, the software application and hardware design.
By: Fran Allen, George Almasi, Wanda Andreoni, Dan Beece, Bruce J. Berne, Terry Bright, Jose Brunheroto, Calin Cascaval, Jose Castanos, Paul Coteus, Paul Crumley Alessandro Curioni, Monty Denneau, Wilm Donath, Maria Eleftheriou, Blake Fitch, Bruce Fleischer, Christos J. Georgiou, Robert Germain, Mark Giampapa, Donna Gresh, Manish Gupta Tiziana Jonas, Matthew Newton, Ruud Haring, Howard Ho, Peter Hochschild, Susan Hummel, Derek Lieber, Glenn Martyna, Kiran Maturu, Jose Moreira, Dennis Newns, Robert Philhower, Thomas Picunko, Jed Pitera, Michael Pitman, Rick Rand, Ajay Royyuru, Valentina Salapura, Alda Sanomiya, Rahul Shah, Yuk Sham, Sarabjeet Singh, Marc Snir, Frank Suits, Richard Swetz, William Swope, Nagesh Vishnumurthy, Chris Ward, Henry S. Warren, Ruhong Zhou
Published in: IBM Systems Journal, volume 40, (no 2), pages 310-27 in 2001
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