Associated Press
06-28-06
ISU joins world's computer elite
Ames, Ia. — A supercomputer acquired by Iowa State University in January has
made the list of the 100 most powerful computers in the world.
The $1.25 million IBM BlueGene/L computer has the equivalent processing
power of more than 2,000 home computers and a storage capacity more than
1,000 times greater.
It performs as many as 5.7 trillion calculations per second, said Srinivas Aluru,
professor of electrical and computer engineering.
IBM has estimated that a person working with a calculator would take 5 million
years to make the same number of calculations.
CyBlue contains 2,048 processors. It includes 11 trillion bytes of data storage,
and all its processing power sits in a black box that’s about the size of a big
refrigerator.
The list of most powerful supercomputers was released Wednesday at the
International Supercomputer Conference in Dresden, Germany.
The TOP500 list has been compiled twice a year since 1993 by Hans Meuer of
the University of Mannheim in Germany; Jack Dongarra of the University of
Tennessee in Knoxville; and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the National
Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
Iowa State last had a computer on the list in November 1993.
The list has the ISU computer as number 99.
The most powerful computer on the list also is an BlueGene/L owned by the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, an applied science laboratory that is
part of the National Nuclear Security Administration within the Department of
Energy. It is located in Livermore, Calif.
The ISU computer is being used to help sequence the corn genome, considered
the most complex sequencing project attempted to date. It also has been used in
gene studies to cluster 3.7 million mouse DNA sequences in less than 10 hours.
Aluru said most previous analyses of that data have been limited to a few
hundred thousand sequences.
It was bought with a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and
$650,000 from the university.