"IBM plans to announce on Monday that the Blue Gene will be available immediately with a starting price of $1.5 million."
As we previously reported, IBM's Blue Gene/L machine has been scoring some fantastic teraflops scores and has already repeatedly stolen the crown from the Earth Simulator as the top of the top 500. Now, IBM plans to sell the product under the name of eServer Blue Gene.
"IBM is selling the machine in configurations ranging from one to 64 racks; each rack has 1,024 processors. A 16-rack configuration is the world record holder, able to perform 70.7 trillion calculations per second, or 70.7 teraflops."
Most of the processors run a stripped down, bare bones OS, whereas master chips run some kind of Linux, which IBM has been touting for a long time now as the future of UNIX. The Blue Gene project has been running since 2000 as part of research work to predict how strings of biochemical building blocks, encoded by DNA, fold into proteins.