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President Obama Honors IBM’s Blue Gene
President Barack Obama recognized IBM and its Blue Gene family of supercomputers with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (figure 1) — the country’s most prestigious award given to leading innovators for technological achievement. The President personally bestowed the award at a special White House ceremony on October 7. IBM, which has earned the National Medal of Technology and Innovation on eight other occasions, is the only company recognized with the award this year.
NMTI
Figure 1. The National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility houses the powerful Blue Gene/P system named Intrepid, with a peak speed of 557 teraflop/s (TF) and a Linpack speed of 450 TF. Intrepid debuted in June 2008 as the world’s fastest computer for open science and third fastest overall. Blue Gene’s speed and expandability have enabled business and science to address a wide range of complex problems and make more informed decisions — not just in the life sciences, but also in astronomy, climate, simulations, modeling, and many other areas. The influence of the Blue Gene supercomputer’s energy-efficient design and computing model currently can be seen across the Information Technology industry. Today, 18 of the top 20 most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world are built on IBM high-performance computing technology, according to the latest Supercomputing “Green500 List” announced by Green500.org in July, 2009.
 
Published by IOP Publishing in association with Argonne National Laboratory, for the US Department of Energy, Office of Science. Copyright © 2009 by IOP.