Blue Gene: A vision for protein science using a petaflop supercomputer

In December 1999, IBM announced the start of a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phe nomena such as protein folding. The project has two main goals: to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large-scale simulation, and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine archit ecture and software. This project should enable biomolecular simulations th at are orders of magnitude larger than current technology permits. Major ar eas of investigation include: how to most effectively utilize this novel pl atform to meet our scientific goals, how to make such massively parallel ma chines more usable, and how: to achieve performance targets, with reasonabl e cost, through novel machine architectures. This paper provides an overvie w of the Blue Gene project at IBM Research. It includes some of the plans t hat have been made, the intended goals, and the anticipated challenges rega rding the scientific work, the software application, and the hardware desig n.