President Obama Honors IBM's Blue Gene Supercomputer With National Medal Of Technology And Innovation
President Obama recognized IBM and its Blue Gene family of supercomputers with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the country's most prestigious award given to leading innovators for technological achievement.
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IBM, which earned the National Medal of Technology and Innovation on seven other occasions, is the only company recognized with the award this year.
Blue Gene's speed and expandability have enabled business and science to address a wide range of complex problems and make more informed decisions -- not just in the life sciences, but also in astronomy, climate, simulations, modeling and many other areas. Blue Gene systems have helped map the human genome, investigated medical therapies, safeguarded nuclear arsenals, simulated radioactive decay, replicated brain power, flown airplanes, pinpointed tumors, predicted climate trends, and identified fossil fuels – all without the time and money that would have been required to physically complete these tasks.
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The system also reflects breakthroughs in energy efficiency. With the creation of Blue Gene, IBM dramatically shrank the physical size and energy needs of a computing system whose processing speed would have required a dedicated power plant capable of generating power to thousands of homes.
The influence of the Blue Gene supercomputer's energy-efficient design and computing model can be seen today across the Information Technology industry. Today, 18 of the top 20 most energy efficient supercomputers in the world are built on IBM high performance computing technology, according to the latest Supercomputing 'Green500 List' announced by Green500.org (link resides outside of ibm.com) in July, 2009.
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The IBM® Blue Gene®/P Solution is a follow-on product to the successful Blue Gene/L Solution, and adheres to the original key design points set forth in the Blue Gene/L Solution. Specifically, the Blue Gene family of supercomputers has been designed to deliver ultrascale performance within a standard programming environment while delivering efficiencies in power, cooling and floor-space consumption. Blue Gene/P extends the performance through density and frequency bump, 4-way SMP enhanced functionality, scalability for petaflop performance, and aggressive power management for low power consumption first established with the Blue Gene Solution.
Many universities and government research labs have deployed Blue Gene for computational studies in weapons research, radio astronomy, protein folding, climate research, cosmology, and drug development.
Blue Gene customers note that time-to-solution for many applications has been reduced by orders of magnitude. Scientists can make new runs more often allowing them to explore alternative models and approaches to problems. Blue Gene is making a demonstrable change in the way science can be done.
Blue Gene/P delivers more than ultrascalable performance. Because of unique design points that allow dense packaging of processors, memory and interconnects, Blue Gene/P offers efficiency in the areas of power, cooling, and floor space consumption.
Available in configurations ranging from one to 256 racks, Blue Gene/P is the innovative new solution from IBM to further expand the limits of breakthrough science without sacrificing efficiency.
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Watch Blue Gene/P webcasts replays
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Photos from the installation of Blue Gene/P at FZ Juelich
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Blue Gene/P helping to facilitate extreme scalability.
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