Rice supercomputer among world’s fastest

Rice University’s Blue Gene/P has made a new list of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers.

The supercomputer installed in March is No. 377 on the list compiled by the University of Mannheim, Germany; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and the University of Tennessee. Blue Gene is intended to aid a broad range of scientific and engineering research related to energy, geophysics, basic life sciences, cancer, personalized medicine and more.

“Blue Gene is well-adapted for use by Rice faculty and researchers who study protein folding, bioinformatics and biological systems, from single molecules to tissues and organs,” said Kamran Khan, Rice’s vice provost for information technology. “Researchers who specialize in biochemical solutions and reactions and molecular dynamics are benefiting from the outstanding processing power, which allows them to model more atoms and yield a better understanding of what happens at grain boundaries.”

The machine doubled the number of supercomputing hours Rice offers its faculty and students when it was installed earlier this year. Blue Gene/P is also being used by researchers at the University of Sao Paulo, which signed a collaboration agreement with Rice in March.

See the list of the top 500 supercomputers here.