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2003 

An initial small scale prototype    roughly the size of a 30 inch television    of IBM's Blue 

Gene/L supercomputer is ranked as the 73rd most powerful supercomputer in the world. The 

prototype is roughly 1/20th the physical size of machines of comparable computing power. 

When completed, Blue Gene/L is expected to operate at a peak performance of about 360 

teraflops (360 trillion operations per second) and occupy 64 racks    taking up only about the 

same space as half of a tennis court.  

IBM and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announce that IBM is joining 

the CERN openlab for DataGrid applications to collaborate in creating a massive data 

management system built on Grid computing. IBM's innovative storage virtualization and  

file management technology    Storage Tank    will play a pivotal role in this collaboration, 

which aims at creating a data file system to help CERN scientists understand some of the most 

fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the universe. By 2005 the CERN openlab 

collaboration with IBM is expected to be able to handle up to a petabyte (a million gigabytes) of 

data, which is the equivalent to the information stored in 20 million four drawer filing cabinets 

or 500 million floppy disks or 1.5 million CD ROMs.  

IBM, United Devices and Accelrys announce a project supporting a global research effort to 

develop new drugs that could possibly combat the smallpox virus post infection. The project will 

be powered through a massive computing  Grid  that will enable millions of computer owners 

worldwide to contribute idle computing resources with the goal of developing a wide collection 

of potential anti smallpox drugs.  

IBM and China's Ministry of Education announce they have begun using grid technology to 

enable universities across the country to collaborate on research, scientific and education 

projects. This is one of the world's largest implementation of Grid computing    which takes 

untapped application, data and computing resources from different computing systems and 

makes them available where and when they are needed, resulting in a single, virtual system.  

IBM creates the world's smallest solid state light emitter. This research breakthrough    the first 

electrically controlled, single molecule light emitter    demonstrates the rapidly improving 

understanding of molecular devices. The results also suggest the unique attributes of carbon 

nanotubes may be applicable to optoelectronics, which is the basis for the high speed 

communications industry.  

Scientists from Columbia University, IBM and the University of New Orleans announce the first 

three dimensional assembly of magnetic and semiconducting particles only billionths of a meter 

across.  

IBM researchers develop an innovative chip design that can improve performance fourfold or 

reduce power consumption fivefold in wireless devices compared to the state of the art thin 

silicon bipolar technology.  

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