For half a century, building a powerful computer meant constructing an enormous machine that inevitably required a tremendous amount of energy. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), introduced in 1945, was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer and weighed 30 tons, covered 1,500 square feet of floor space and used more than 17,000 vacuum tubes. Running it required 160 kilowatts of electrical power. Even at that size, ENIAC could execute only about 5,000 additions per second.
In the decades that followed, high-performance computers became exponentially faster but still demanded an enormous amount of energy and square footage — and produced so much heat that elaborate cooling facilities had to be constructed to ensure proper operation. All of which proved bad for the environment and made owning a supercomputer incredibly expensive.
In 1999, a team of IBM engineers and scientists looked to chart a new course for supercomputer design with the Blue Gene/L prototype. From an engineering standpoint, the guiding principle of the team was simple but innovative: Do more with less.
IBM’s Alan Gara was chief system architect for the three generations of Blue Gene supercomputers. He identified power consumption and reliability as two of the primary constraints on the continued scaling of supercomputing architecture. Gara created a design based on low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) nodes, with dense packaging and multiple interconnection networks that scaled beyond anything previously envisioned. The design dramatically simplified the number of instructions carried out by each processor, enabling them to work faster and with significantly lower power and chip surface requirements. Gara’s groundbreaking work won the IEEE Computer Society’s 2010 Seymour Cray Award.
Blue Gene took five years and USD 100 million to develop, with the first machine developed at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York and built at the company’s facility in Rochester, Minnesota. The name of the computer was a nod to its work with genetics combined with IBM’s nickname, “Big Blue.” On September 29, 2004, the IBM Blue Gene/L became the fastest computer in the world, surpassing NEC’s Earth Simulator. Blue Gene/L used 131,000 processors to handle 280 trillion operations every second. One scientist with a calculator would have to work nonstop for 177,000 years to perform the operations that Blue Gene could do in a single second.
Blue Gene computers went on to enable significant advances in designing ultra-efficient electric car batteries, understanding global climate change and exploring the evolution of our universe.