The new computer, dubbed "Blue Gene," will be capable of more than one quadrillion calculations per second, making it 1,000 times faster than the company's Deep Blue machine that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov two years ago, IBM said in a statement.
IBM said Blue Gene will initially be used in biology research by modeling the folding of human proteins. Researching how proteins fold is expected to give medical researchers a better understanding of diseases as well as potential cures.
IBM said it's using a new approach called SMASH, which stands for "Simply, Many and Self-Healing," in order to build Blue Gene. The new supercomputer will consist in part of more than one million processors, each capable of one billion calculations per second, and a compact two-foot by two-foot board containing 64 of the chips capable of 2 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second), making Blue Gene 500 times more powerful than 8,000-square foot ASCI computers. ASCI stands for Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, the Energy Department's plan to let computer simulations pick up where actual nuclear weapon tests left off, IBM said.
About 50 scientists from IBM Research's Deep Computing Institute and Computational Biology Group will work on Blue Gene and the protein folding initiative, the company said.
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