An academic team from the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics  in the University of Edinburgh and from the Physics Department at Columbia University have collaborated with IBM over the last three years on the chip design
(historical right) of IBM's next generation BlueGene prototype computer in a unique industrial-academic collaboration  working on fit-for-purpose quantum chromodynamics (QCD).

This prototype has been judged the world's most energy efficient supercomputer, taking first place in Supercomputing 'Green500 List'  November 2010.

Both Edinburgh and Columbia Universities plan to use the system to advance QCD simulations in their research of particle physics.  Edinburgh University's system is funded by UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and will be installed at the Advanced Computing Facility at the University of Edinburgh.

Columbia University's design effort is a partnership with RIKEN BNL Research Center which, with Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), funds a system to be installed at BNL.

Energy efficiency, including performance per watt for the most computationally demanding workloads, has long been a core design principle in developing IBM systems.

According to the Green500 list, IBM supercomputers are the most energy efficient supercomputers. For example, for every $1 spent on electricity with the #2 system on the Green500 list, clients would spend $0.56 cents on a petascale system based on IBM's nextgen Blue Gene , which is 77% more energy efficient, than the next system on the Green500 list

IBM's nextgen Blue Gene is scheduled to be deployed in 2012 by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), both collaborated closely with IBM on Blue Gene design influencing many software and hardware design aspects.

"As a research and development laboratory, we depend on large high performance computing systems to fulfill our national security missions," said Dona Crawford, (left)  associate director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"By reducing energy costs, we are able to make high performance computing (HPC) resources available to more researchers and their collaborators, advancing both science and the computing applications that make it possible."

"IBM's next generation Blue Gene provides a glimpse of the discipline needed to improve power efficiency in order to allow the industry to build exascale-class systems capable of solving highly complex challenges," said (right) Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing at Argonne National Laboratory.

"Running such a powerful computer so efficiently shows that we can balance the demands of the advanced simulation and modelling community with environmental concerns."

Columbia University and University of Edinburgh in contributing to nextgen Blue Gene's processor chip design understandably plan to use the system  for its "fit for purpose"  advanced quantum chromodynamics computing.