Author: Dan Simmons
Date: 09:37:54 02/28/00
Excerpt from article in Physician's Financial News: IBM is following up on the success of its chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue with a new endeavor that will delve into the mysteries of the human body. The company recently said it plans to build a computer of staggering power to solve the mystery of the structure of proteins, the workhorse molecules and building blocks of the body. Paul Horn, senior vice-pres of reasearch at IBM, said the computer, called Blue Gene, could provide crucial understanding of how viruses like hepatitis and HIV attack the body.... IBM expects it will take four to five years and $100 million to build Blue Gene, which will be a million times faster than the average desktop computer. It will perform 1 quadrillion mathematical operations per second - 500 times more than the fastest computer today. Still, IBM's task is daunting.... Blue Gene will have 1 million processors, the central computing engines of computers, working together. The concept is not new, but the scale is unprecedented and will force the computer to be "self-healing" - that is, it has to be able to detect failing components, seal them off and direct the work elsewhere. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer defeated the world's greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov, in a highly publicized tournament.
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