IISc acquires IBM's BlueGene

Bangalore: The Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has just purchased a supercomputer off IBM, reported BusinessLine.

The supercomputer will be used for high-end, computing-intensive research projects. Computer systems, computational science and bioinformatics are the three primary domains that the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) division of IISc, does research in.

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BlueGene/L, also called a high performance computing device or a massively parallel computer (it is a cluster of 65,536 computers), has a peak speed of 360 tera flops (one tera flops is the equivalent of one trillion operations performed per sec).

"The four-rack supercomputer being bought would be the largest outside Japan," according to Dr C. Mohan, Chief Scientist, IBM India, speaking at the India Innovation Summit organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in the city. The price per rack of IBM's machine is about $2 million.

However, SERC scientists were unavailable for further details. Currently, IISC uses IBM's cluster computer P720, Regatta pSeries 690, the RS/6000 SP3 and C-DAC's PARAM 10000, as well as SGI's Altix 3700 and 350.

For solving a protein-folding problem, the Linux-based machine was bought by Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and the Astron radio telescope project are other buyers of the supercomputer.