Sites New York Blue
| System Name | New York Blue |
| Site | Stony Brook/BNL, New York Center for Computational Sciences |
| System Family | IBM BlueGene |
| System Model | eServer Blue Gene Solution |
| Computer | eServer Blue Gene Solution |
| Vendor | IBM |
| URL | http://www.newyorkblue.bnl.gov... |
| Application area | Research |
| Installation Year | 2007 |
| Operating System | CNK/SLES 9 |
| Interconnect | Proprietary |
| Processor | PowerPC 440 700 MHz (2.8 GFlops) |
New York Blue is an 18 rack IBM Blue Gene/L massively parallel supercomputer located at
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL)
in Upton, Long Island, New York.
It is the centerpiece of the New York Center for
Computational Sciences (NYCCS), a cooperative effort between
BNL and
Stony Brook University that will also involve
universities throughout the state of New York.
Each of the 18 racks consists of 1024 compute nodes (a total of 18432 nodes)
with each node containing two 700 MHz PowerPC 440 core processors and 1 GB of memory
(a total of 36864 processors and 18.4 TB of memory).
The racks are arranged as six rows of three racks each.
With a peak performance of 103.22 teraflops (trillion floating-point calculations per second), New York Blue will allow computations critical for research in biology, medicine, material science, nanoscience, renewable energy, finance and technology.
The Blue Gene/L computer is a massively parallel supercomputer based on IBM system-on-a-chip technology. Information on the hardware and software designs of the Blue Gene/L, as well as some early applications and performance measurements, can be found in Volume 49 of the IBM Journal of Research and Development.
In addition to the Blue Gene/L series, two racks of Blue Gene/P series are expected to arrive at BNL the last quarter of 2007. Each BG/P rack contains 1024 850 MHz quad-processor nodes with each node having 2GB of memory.
One of the objectives in the Blue Gene design was to retain the exceptional cost/performance ratio levels achieved by application-specific machines, such as the QCDSP and the QCDOC machines, while generalizing the massively parallel architecture enough to enable a relatively broad class of applications. The QCDSP and the QCDOC computers (the "predecessors" of Blue Gene) are two generations of multithousand-node multidimensional mesh-based computers designed to study quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong nuclear force. The QCDSP (QCD on digital Signal Processing) machine won the Gordon Bell Prize in the price/performance category in 1998. A 12288-processor, 600 gigaflops QCDSP machine, was constructed at BNL for the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (RBRC). QCDOC (QCD On Chip) utilizes a six-dimensional mesh and compute nodes fabricated with IBM system-on-a-chip technology. BNL currently hosts two large (12,288 nodes, 10 teraflops peak each) QCDOC machines: one for the RBRC community funded by RIKEN and the other for the US Lattice Gauge Theory community funded by the US Department of Energy. An extensive description of the QCDOC and QCDSP machines can be found in (pdf) Overview of the QCDSP and QCDOC Computers.