Blue Gene supercomputer

It was clear that having information about the patient s DNA on the record could one day be vital to the selection of the correct drugs, for example, using the Blue Gene supercomputer to model patient protein-drug interactions in atomic detail. A demonstration was possible in 2000 on a much slower com-... 

A mere 50 years ago computers were cumbersome. By the 1990s, they were powerful enough to be used in routine medical image analysis, and by 2000, IBM was announcing the construction of a powerful new class of supercomputer, Blue Gene, intended to overcome key problems in molecular medicine by running at petaflop speed of 1,000,000,000,000,000 or 1015 mathematical calculations per second. Another IBM machine, also with molecular and medical applications, recently broke that barrier first (see Chapter 10). 

Blue Gene/L supercomputer The National Nuclear Security Administration s BlueGene/L supercomputer, built by IBM, performs at 280.6 trillion operations per second and is now the world s festest supercomputer. 

Roadrmmer The Roadrunner supercomputer, built by IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, can process more tban 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second. It works more than twice as fast as the Blue Gene/L supercomputer and is housed at Los Alamos in New Mexico. 

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