Photos: The birth of a supercomputer

Rochester is the home of the Blue Gene supercomputer, and is also the birthplace of the AS400. The man who developed both, IBM chief scientist Frank Soltis, believes that the weather in chilly Rochester helps to develop better engineers and scientists. "There is not much else to do here," he says.

IBM claims that it supplies more than half the supercomputing capacity in the world, with 219 systems currently installed. The most prominent is Blue Gene, a much more powerful version of Deep Blue, the computer that beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov back in 1997.

What makes Blue Gene so unusual in supercomputing circles is that it is wholly based on the Power PC architecture, instead of a proprietary processor. That's the Power 4 processor, too, not the faster, later Power 5.

Power 4 is most suitable, IBM says, because it is not as highly clocked as other processors, so it produces less heat. The result is that Power 4 chips can be packed very closely together which helps in performance (cutting the distance travelled increases the speed of operations) and also lowers cost, as there is no need for expensive water-cooling.