What is the Blue Gene project?

Blue Gene is an ambitious project to expand the horizons of supercomputing, with the ultimate goal of creating a system that can perform 1 quadrillion calculations per second, or 1 petaflop. IBM expects a machine it calls Blue Gene/P to be the first to achieve this computational milestone. Today’s fastest machine, NEC’s Earth Simulator is comparatively slow — about onethirteenth of 1 petaflop.