A new supercomputer dubbed "Blue Gene" was dedicated in a ceremony held at MIT on Thursday. The new computer will be used by MIT physicists comprised of faculty as well as post-doctorate, graduate, and senior thesis students, to perform advanced research in areas such as lattice quantum chromo dynamics (QCD) and other extremely resource intensive computational physics problems. William A. Coolidge Professor of Physics, John Negele, who is the principal investigator for the Blue Gene Project said "The MIT Blue Gene computer will have tremendous impact on our research in QCD. For the first time, our resources will be of the same magnitude as dedicated facilities in Japan, Germany, the U.K. and the RIKEN Center at Brookhaven National Lab."
Although it is extremely fast and computationally powerful, power isn"t something that Blue Gene requires a lot of. "A unique feature is its compactness and low energy consumption," Negele said. "The single rack at MIT has the same power as a conventional cluster filling a large room and uses an order of magnitude less electrical power and air conditioning, heralding a new era of energy efficient computing."