Cheaper Supercomputers

IBM is maybe the leader of the supercomputer building industry and in June it announced the launch of the next generation Blue Gene/P supercomputer that is much faster than its predecessor and is priced at $1.3 million per rack, according to the news site ComputerWorld. As a marketing move to support and widen the acceptance of the new supercomputer, IBM dropped the price of the Blue Gene/L to about $800,000. Herb Schultz, IBM's deep-computing marketing manager, said that the price reduction prompted the doubling of sales of older generation super computers.

"It's still a very viable platform," Schultz says. Among universities, "we've had some really big sales." He named Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY and the State University of New York at Stony Brook as two new L-model customers." Another buyer of a Blue Gene/L supercomputer was the University of Alabama at Birmingham( UAB for short) that will use the machine for designing drugs that could "treat clogged arteries, neurological diseases and certain types of cancer". "We knew the L was a model near the end of its production, and we were able to secure a much better price on that than we would on the newer model," says Richard Marchase, vice president for research and economic development at UAB. "For our purposes, the L had plenty of capacity."

The older Blue Gene/L, while a powerful machine itself with 5.6 trillion operations per second, is outclassed by the even more powerful and newer Blue Gene/P that can reach a record 13.9 trillion operations per second. For marketing considerations, IBM will stop Blue Gene/L fabrication and sales, aiming at transferring existing customers to the newer platform, that delivers "more power per dollar and per watt". The new system already has announced customers like he U.S. Department of Energy and the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science and IBM is expecting to finally find a customer to buy a mega system composed of 72 Blue Gene/P racks that according to Herb Schultz will reach 1 "quadrillion mathematical calculations per second".