Technology and Applications of BlueGene Supercomputer and Cell Broadband Engine

This paper gives an overview of the technologies and applications of the BlueGene supercomputer and the Cell Broadband Engine. BlueGene/L consists of thousands of low power PowerPC-based ASICs and occupies the number one position in the top 500 supercomputer list with 360 Teraflops of peak performance using 65,536 compute nodes. The Cell Broadband Engine is 9 core processors, with one PowerPC core and 8 SPE cores. Each Cell BE attains over 200 Gigaflops of peak performance when running at 3.2 GHz. In contrast to complicated high-frequency unicore processors, BlueGene and Cell BE processor use multiprocessor approaches and attain high performance per Watt. These systems will clearly have influence on future microprocessor designs.