Blue Gene

To discuss the Blue gene, we must have an idea about supercomputers. Supercomputers are the world’s largest and fastest computers which are primarily used for complex scientific calculations. A supercomputer is more like a desktop or personal computer we have in our home or office premises. They both contain hard drives, memory, and processors. Both desktop or personal computers and supercomputers are equipped with similar processors but their clocking speed and memory sizes are significantly different. Now, take a look at the comparison. A desktop computer built in the year 2000 normally has a hard disk with the data capacity of between 4 and 50 gigabytes and one processor with tens of megabytes of random access memory (RAM) – just enough to perform tasks such as word processing, web browsing, and video gaming. Meanwhile, a supercomputer of the same time period has thousands of processors, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM, and hard drives that allow for hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of gigabytes of storage space.

The supercomputer’s large number of processors, extraordinary disk storage, and substantial memory greatly increase the power and speed of the machine. Although desktop computers can perform millions of floating-point operations per second (megaflops), supercomputers can perform at speeds of billions of operations per second (gigaflops) and trillions of operations per second (teraflops).

Now, we will know what Blue Gene is. Blue Gene is a cooperative project among IBM (particularly IBM Rochester and Thomas J. Watson Research Center), the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the United States Department of energy and academia. It is a computer architecture project designed to produce several supercomputers that are designed to reach operating speeds in PFLOPS (peta-FLOPS) range. By using the higher computation process we can understand the importance of various biological processes such as Protein Folding. Exploring more about Biomolecular structures the medical researcher can conclude more deep knowledge about diseases.

Blue Gene supercomputers play a significant role in the blue brain project to carry out the brain simulations. The blue brain project aims to build comprehensive digital reconstructions of the brain which can be used to study the nature of the brain. The project is owned by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and they managed to purchase the Blue Gene supercomputer at a much-reduced cost as IBM wanted to test their supercomputers.

The corporate color of IBM is “Blue” and the “gene” comes from computational biology. There are four blue gene projects under development.

• Blue Gene/L
• Blue Gene/P
• Blue Gene/Q
• Blue Gene/C

The first supercomputer developed in blue gene series is blue gene L. It is jointly developed with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Blue Gene/L is sometimes specified as the computer used in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.