The machine began life as a research project in 2000, is currently the world's fastest supercomputer, and has only four publicly announced customers. But as IBM earlier promised would happen, the design has now become a comparatively ordinary product sold by IBM's server group under the brand name eServer Blue Gene.
IBM plans to announce on Monday that the Blue Gene will be available immediately with a starting price of $1.5 million. Monday is also the opening day of the SC2004 supercomputing show in Pittsburgh.
IBM is selling the machine in configurations ranging from one to 64 racks; each rack has 1,024 processors. A 16-rack configuration is the world record holder, able to perform 70.7 trillion calculations per second, or 70.7 teraflops, according to a convenient if imperfect speed test called Linpack.
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c|net
Nov 8, 2004, 04:02 PM
