Most Expensive Supercomputer in the US

Most Expensive Supercomputer in the US

IBM’s BlueGene/L machine is both the fastest and most expensive supercomputer ever built in the United States. It was built at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The supercomputer is built from 64 racks of Blue Gene servers, each of which contains 1,024 700MHz dual-core PowerPC processors.

Specifications listed on LLNL’s website about their BlueGene/L system
are as follows:

  • 65,536 compute nodes, each targeted for 2.8 GFlop/s peak
  • Chip multiprocessor with 4MB L3 cache on chip
  • High-bandwidth low-latency 3D torus and combining tree networks
  • 32 terabytes of memory
  • High-performance kernel on compute nodes, Linux on I/O nodes
  • Hardware support for Message Passing Interface collectives

BlueGene/L currently tops the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list with a Linpack performance benchmark of 280.6 TFlop/s.

IBM sells a single 1,024 processor BlueGene rack for approximately $2,000,000. The BlueGene/L supercomputer was built by IBM for the DoE along with the ASCI Purple supercomputer that benchmarks at 63.39 TFlop/s as part of a $290,000,000 contract. The supercomputers will both be used for nuclear weapons simulations.

31 replies on “Most Expensive Supercomputer in the US”

  1. would it fit in my room?

  2. caleb dsdsd
    says:

    could it run flight simulator??

  3. yeop i’ll have 2 because we all wat a computer that can to 280 trillion operation a second ….. now that could do my maths homework quickly

  4. bam kittens
    says:

    OK SO THEY SPENT ALL THAT MONEY ON THAT COMPUTER AND THEY SAY THAT THEY ARE USEING IT FOR nuclear weapons simulations YEA RIGHT THATS BULL AS IF THEY WOULD TELL US
    IS IS PROB WORSE THAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS RESEARCH SCARY

  5. I think its not for our use because it is very expensive. Americans are going very fast and they must do something for undeveloped countries

  6. Aslan loew
    says:

    As long as it can play Minesweeper ~.^

  7. News Zone @ SoftZone » Blog Archive » Most Expensive Computer in the World
    says:

    […] performance. This gave it the top spot on the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list until 2004 when IBM’s BlueGene/L supercomputer took its place using an architecture that cost less than half as much to […]

  8. dude um what do you u do with 32 terabytes of ram seriously and it dosent even tell you the hardrive info its prob like 3000 terabytes

  9. as long as it has a floppy disc drive @(^_^)@

  10. “The supercomputers will both be used for nuclear weapons simulations”. YEA RIGHT. Bet the first thing they did with it was run SOLITAIRE!

  11. All that money to find out if our bombs that we should never have to use work or not. All that money NOT spent on things that really matter… I love the U.S. government. Always thinking about the people, not rediculous projects with little to no benifit.

  12. Most Expensive Computer in the World « Tourismcambodia’s Blog
    says:

    […] performance. This gave it the top spot on the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list until 2004 when IBM’s BlueGene/L supercomputer took its place using an architecture that cost less than half as much to […]

  13. Maybe NSA/CIA/FBI use that computer to monitor everyone’s e-mail and stuff. And to hack into anyones computer at any given time. Nah! I read to much Dan Brown. That book about the women who works as cryptologist at the NSA rocks!

  14. really scary, i only live 6 blocks from ibm in seattle, u better bet that computer isnt our friend,
    time to write a program to kill it huh?

  15. I’m guessing with this technology out there, it won’t be long until these things are sold worldwide.

  16. omg the computers gunna kill me :O

  17. That money, I can build 1000 very beatuful house in my village

  18. its that good like we think ..we can hack any bank any computer anything with a peutium 3 so why we must a that think whick is affordable for me ….lol am only 16 year old..
    where ill got so much money…

  19. just imagaine they can make a whole wide variety of stuff right i mean they can make big fast computers why does every phone have to be tha same? and computers and stuff!! i want to make my own phone…

  20. Lol, I would have like 100 different sessions of Team Fortress running on that baby, and invite all my buds over to play XD the computer could probably hold like 400 people playing at the same time before ANY lag :O

  21. can you play Runescape on that?

  22. Kristopher Bishop
    says:

    Come now my friends, everybody knows the NSA runs out of the AT&T building in San Francisco. Also, who cares if people are watching me? They would get bored really fast.

  23. You people are clueless… This government has technology we cannot yet even fathom. 32 Terabytes of memory! Wow!! There are computers for our government running several Exabyte’s of memory. You all need to broaden your horizons and open your eyes to whats really out there. Start by researching the Montauk Project.

  24. Can you fit in your room, more like can you afford it

  25. can it run ps3 games?

  26. dfghjkl321
    says:

    no nuclear testing should be allowed.

  27. dfghjkl321
    says:

    Nuclear weapons could destroy the worlds and pollute the air and destroy wild life

  28. Half hand hoodoo
    says:

    Can it handle WOW and all the patches

  29. I so wanna play crysis on that thing!!!!

  30. @viswanath608
    says:

    Can i run Hearts in it? Or can i run S4 league, SA-MP, GTA IV, COD Black ops, Crysis 2, Portal 2 on it?

  31. Noneofurbusiness
    says:

    the ULTIMATE Minecraft server