Harvard Gets One of World’s Top Supercomputers

One of the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world is now up and running for Harvard’s Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences (DEAS).

The IBM Blue Gene, which has the processing power of several thousand desktop computers in roughly the floor space of two desks, will be used to study complex systems such as blood circulation and galaxy formation, according to Director of Information Technology Joy Sircar.

Harvard’s Blue Gene is called CrimsonGridBGL and will be part of the DEAS’s Crimson Grid, a technology initiative aimed at creating a campus-wide technology infrastructure for research purposes.

DEAS acquired the system from IBM early this fall and researchers began operating at the beginning of October, according to Dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences Venkatesh Narayanamurti.

“The unique architecture that combines performance with scalability in a tremendously efficient power and floor space design,” is what makes the system special, Sircar wrote in an e-mail.

The CrimsonGridBGL’s enormous processing ability—4,096 processors performing 11 trillion floating-point calculations per second, using five times less power than a traditional computer cluster with the same capability—will enable it to perform complicated simulations.

“There are natural phenomena and processes which cannot be studied by direct observation or experimentation,” Watson Professor of Computer Science Michael O. Rabin wrote in an e-mail, referring to the need for computer modeling the Blue Gene executes.

Use of the machine will be open to DEAS affiliates who submit a proposal to a core faculty consortium, although the faculty members making up the consortium have priority of access.

“We expect that the Blue Gene system will enable new ways of thinking, generate completely new insights and enable ‘revolutionary’ or breakthrough science compared to the traditional ‘evolutionary’ science possible through use of existing platforms,” Sircar wrote.

Funding for the system was provided by the DEAS.

Other universities that use the Blue Gene Solution technology include MIT and Boston University, according to the supercomputer statistics list top500.org. According to an IBM spokesman, Harvard’s Blue Gene is the largest Blue Gene system in academia as measured by its processing speed.