Rather than focus only on academic and government research, IBM is targeting commercial research, such as in the oil and gas industry; as well as organizations like financial services companies that need supercomputing power to run parts of their business.

To broaden Blue Gene's appeal, IBM hasn't only made a faster, higher-performing machine than the older version, but has made application development on the system easier, Herb Schultz, deep computing marketing manager for IBM, told InformationWeek. "The ability to write applications with Blue Gene/P has advanced quite a bit from the previous generation."

The advancements are meant to make it easier for organizations to move applications from a competing x86 high-performance computing environment without having to make architectural changes to the software. To do that, IBM has moved Blue Gene/P to a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory. In addition, IBM has doubled the memory for each server node to 2 Gbytes.

IBM is on the right track in going beyond universities and government to commercial users, said James Staten, analyst for Forrester Research. 

By: Doc Memory
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