Russia buys IBM Blue Gene, one of the World’s most powerful computers

Russia’s Moscow State University has recently purchased an IBM Blue Gene, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

“This is the first time that such sophisticated technology has been exported to the former Soviet Union” according to makers IBM.

“The Blue Gene computer is capable of 27.8 trillion operations per second and is being used by the university for nanotechnology and scientific applications such as modelling the heart.”

“This agreement with IBM heralds a new era of supercomputing in Russia,” said Viktor Sadovnichiy, director of the university, in a statement. The world’s most powerful supercomputer is a Blue Gene device owned by the US Department of Energy and used at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to model the ageing of the US nuclear weapons stockpile and predict potential problems.

According to IBM, the supercomputer will be among the top 50 most powerful computers in the world.

The Moscow University paid approximately $5 million for two racks of the supercomputer, which can run 2,600 times faster than the fastest home PC.

Internal design of the Blue Gene is shown in the image below

Website: IBN Live