In a mere 20 days, IBM’s Blue Gene Watson supercomputer crunches enough data to model one microsecond’s behavior of a folding protein in the eye while gulping in enough energy to power 500 homes. Lousy economy aside, power is the scourge of the IT industry. IBM helped create the problem by pushing the boundaries of computation; now IBM Research is trying to solve it, too, by going to the sub-molecular scale to root out the waste in every computer.
IBM’s Infinite Research Problem
December 9, 2008