Rochester is the home of the Blue Gene supercomputer, and is also
the birthplace of the AS400. The man who developed both, IBM chief
scientist Frank Soltis, believes that the weather in chilly Rochester
helps to develop better engineers and scientists. "There is not much
else to do here," he says.
IBM claims that it supplies more than half the supercomputing
capacity in the world, with 219 systems currently installed. The most
prominent is Blue Gene, a much more powerful version of Deep Blue, the
computer that beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov back in 1997.
What makes Blue Gene so unusual in supercomputing circles is that it
is wholly based on the Power PC architecture, instead of a proprietary
processor. That's the Power 4 processor, too, not the faster, later
Power 5.
Power 4 is most suitable, IBM says, because it is not as highly
clocked as other processors, so it produces less heat. The result is
that Power 4 chips can be packed very closely together which helps in
performance (cutting the distance travelled increases the speed of
operations) and also lowers cost, as there is no need for expensive
water-cooling.
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