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Blue Gene gets first customer

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW YORK: IBM Corp. said that the Mayo Clinic will become its first commercial client to use the Blue Gene super computer. Financial terms were not disclosed.

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The Mayo Clinic is a not-for-profit organization based in Rochester, Minnesota, with medical and research facilities. It will use Blue Gene for simulations to find causes and cures for diseases.

Bill Zeitler, Senior Vice President of Systems and Technology group at IBM, said the application of super computing technology is going to lead to radical breakthroughs in medical science.

Armonk, New York-based IBM, the world's largest computer services company, has been looking at ways to boost its slow growth in revenue and profits. Super computing and Blue Gene is one of its focus areas.

IBM has invested about $100 million in developing Blue Gene. It is designed for mathematical intensive problems like simulating how proteins fold and modeling diseases and viruses.

Blue Gene is part of IBM's next generation super computers and is based on chips used in Nintendo GameCube.

Commercial super computing is a very large market, Zeitler said. IBM currently has two super computer centers that they offer for commercial use. The two centers put together have a capacity of 17 teraflops, or 17 trillion mathematical operations per second. Zeitler said that over the next two years, IBM's super computing capacity could grow a 100 times to some 1,700 teraflops.

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