135,300,000,000,000 floating point operations per second is the latest super computing record, achieved by IBM’s Blue Gene at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The scalable design of Blue Gene’s architecture allowed it to double it’s own record of 70.7 tera flops (trillion floating point operations per second) of November 2004. Blue Gene is expected to reach 360 tera flops by summer, after being expanded to 131,072 processors on 65,536 nodes. Each node includes two processors, four mathematical engines, four megabyte of memory, and various communication systems. Running the Linux operating system, Blue Gene computers are designed to perform a wide range of scientific simulations, in particular in the field of molecular dynamics, including protein folding, laser-plasma interactions, life sciences cosmology and aging of materials. Read more…