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The first computer in the Blue Gene series, Blue Gene/L, developed through a partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, cost $100 million and is intended to scale to speeds in the hundreds of teraflops, with a peak performance of 360 teraflops. This is almost ten times as fast as the Earth Simulator, the fastest supercomputer in the world before Blue Gene. Two Blue Gene/L prototypes have entered the TOP500 Supercomputer List at the #4 and #8 positions. On September 29, 2004, IBM announced that a Blue Gene/L prototype had overtaken NEC's Earth Simulator as the fastest computer in the world, with a speed of 36.01 teraflops, beating Earth Simulator's 35.86 teraflops. The machine later reached a speed of 70.72 teraflops.
The Blue Gene computer architecture is designed to scale to speeds of up to one petaflops. Blue Gene/L will have a total of 65,536 processors (i.e., 64K processors). Some of the nodes will use the Linux operating system. Each processor will be attached to three parallel communications networks: a 3D toroidal network for peer-to-peer communication, a tree network for collective communication, and an Ethernet network for bootingIn computing, booting is a bootstrapping process that starts operating systems when the user turns on a computer system. A boot sequence is the set of operations the computer performs when it is switched on which load an operating system. Most computer sy and diagnostics.
With so many nodes, components will be failing frequently. Thus, the system will be able to electrically isolate faulty hardware to allow the machine to continue to run.
In public relationsPublic relations (PR) is the practice of conveying messages to the public through the media on behalf of a client, with the intention of changing the public's actions by influencing their opinions. PR practitioners usually target only certain segments of terms, it is being positioned as the successor of IBM's Deep BlueDeep Blue was IBM's chess playing computer. Deep Blue was the first computer system to win a chess game against a reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, under regular time controls. This first win occurred on February 10, 1996, and Deep Blue Kasparov, 1 chess computer; however it bears little architectural resemblance to Deep Blue.