The IBM Blue Gene/P

The Blue Gene/P system was installed at the RZG in September 2007. The Blue Gene/P is a massively parallel supercomputer based on the IBM system-on-a-chip technology. It can scale to the PetaFlop regime while featuring efficient power consumption and densely packed configuration.
Initially, the system was made up of 2 racks with 32 node boards each. Each node board is populated with 32 quad-core compute nodes. Thus, in total we had 2048 compute nodes (8192 cores), along with 16 quad-core I/O nodes. The total main memory was 4 TByte.

In January 2008, the Blue Gene/P was extended by a third rack and in October 2008 a fourth rack was added, thus increasing the number of cores to 16384 with a total memory of 8 TByte. The peak performance is now 55 TF/s.

Communication is done using a fast 3D torus network. The I/O nodes are connected to the outside world via a 10 Gbit/s Ethernet network.