Welcome to New York Blue

Leveraging New York State Investment in Computational Sciences

New York Blue/L is an 18 rack IBM Blue Gene/L massively parallel supercomputer located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, Long Island, New York. It is the centerpiece of the New York Center for Computational Sciences (NYCCS), a cooperative effort between BNL and Stony Brook University that will also involve universities throughout the state of New York. Each of the 18 racks consists of 1024 compute nodes (a total of 18432 nodes) with each node containing two 700 MHz PowerPC 440 core processors and 1 GB of memory (a total of 36864 processors and 18.4 TB of memory). The racks are arranged as six rows of three racks each.

New York Blue is critical for computations in biology, medicine, materials, nanoscience, renewable energy, climate science, finance and technology. It is the centerpiece of the New York Center for Computational Sciences (NYCCS).

Features of New York Blue/L

• IBM Blue Gene
• 100 teraflops
• 18-rack configuration
• 36,864 processors

In addition to New York Blue/L, there is New York Blue/P which consists of two racks of the Blue Gene/P series. Each BG/P rack contains 1024 850 MHz quad-processor nodes with each node having 2GB of memory.

With a peak performance of 103.22 teraflops (trillion floating-point calculations per second), New York Blue/L will allow computations critical for research in biology, medicine, material science, nanoscience, renewable energy, climate science, finance and technology.

The Blue Gene/L computer is a massively parallel supercomputer based on IBM system-on-a-chip technology. Information on the hardware and software designs of the Blue Gene/L, as well as some early applications and performance measurements, can be found in Volume 49 of the IBM Journal of Research and Development.

One of the objectives in the Blue Gene design was to retain the exceptional cost/performance ratio levels achieved by application-specific machines, such as the QCDSP and the QCDOC machines, while generalizing the massively parallel architecture enough to enable a relatively broad class of applications. The QCDSP and the QCDOC computers (the "predecessors" of Blue Gene) are two generations of multithousand-node multidimensional mesh-based computers designed to study quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong nuclear force. The QCDSP (QCD on digital Signal Processing) machine won the Gordon Bell Prize in the price/performance category in 1998. A 12288-processor, 600 gigaflops QCDSP machine, was constructed at BNL for the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (RBRC). QCDOC (QCD On Chip) utilizes a six-dimensional mesh and compute nodes fabricated with IBM system-on-a-chip technology.

BNL currently hosts two large (12,288 nodes, 10 teraflops peak each) QCDOC machines: one for the RBRC community funded by RIKEN and the other for the US Lattice Gauge Theory community funded by the US Department of Energy. An extensive description of the QCDOC and QCDSP machines can be found in Overview of the QCDSP and QCDOC Computers (PDF).

Last Modified: August 28, 2008
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One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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