Most Expensive Supercomputer in the US

Written by: tom Filed Under: Electronics, United States on September 30th, 2006

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.


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(18) Comments

18 comments...What do you think?

  1. Posted by dalton 16th October, 2006 at 2:08 pm

    would it fit in my room?

  2. Posted by caleb dsdsd 31st January, 2007 at 10:12 am

    could it run flight simulator??

  3. Posted by bobey joe 6th February, 2007 at 11:56 pm

    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. Posted by bam kittens 5th May, 2007 at 3:46 am

    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. Posted by Asif 27th June, 2007 at 6:40 am

    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. Posted by Aslan loew 4th July, 2007 at 1:48 pm

    As long as it can play Minesweeper ~.^

  7. Posted by News Zone @ SoftZone » Blog Archive » Most Expensive Computer in the World 29th January, 2008 at 7:53 am

    [...] 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. Posted by james 27th May, 2008 at 4:19 am

    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. Posted by paul 27th August, 2008 at 10:21 pm

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

  10. Posted by Swami 30th September, 2008 at 2:27 am

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

  11. Posted by Tirynth 7th November, 2008 at 12:01 pm

    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. Posted by Most Expensive Computer in the World « Tourismcambodia’s Blog 26th November, 2008 at 10:41 pm

    [...] 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. Posted by Roland 26th January, 2009 at 6:36 pm

    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. Posted by don finch 5th February, 2009 at 7:19 am

    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. Posted by Anonymous 23rd February, 2009 at 7:15 am

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

  16. Posted by bob 3rd March, 2009 at 4:24 pm

    omg the computers gunna kill me :O

  17. Posted by Singchai 7th June, 2009 at 12:07 am

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

  18. Posted by kapil 25th October, 2009 at 2:43 pm

    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…

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