49 

2004 

Science & Technology 

With 3,248 patents in 2004, IBM earns more U.S. patents than any other company for the twelfth 

consecutive year. IBM has 1,314 more patents than any other company. This is the fourth 

consecutive year IBM has received more than 3,000 U.S. patents and remains the only company 

to receive more than 2,000 patents in one year. 

The University of California at Irvine selects a powerful IBM supercomputer as its Earth System 

Modeling Facility (ESMF) to model and predict changes to the Earth's surface, atmosphere and 

oceans up to 300 years into the future. The ESMF is capable of calculating 528 gigaflops (a 

billion floating point operations per second) and consists of seven IBM eServer p655 systems, 

connected together with IBM's clustering technology, each with eight POWER4+ 

microprocessors, and one IBM eServer p690 system, with 32 POWER4+ microprocessors.  

IBM and the Spanish Minister of Education & Science unveil the most powerful supercomputer 

in Europe. Named  MareNostrum,  the system is built with highly scalable and flexible IBM 

eServer BladeCenter JS20 blade servers and is based on the Linux operating system and IBM's 

POWER microprocessors. MareNostrum has already reached a sustained performance of 20.53 

teraflops and is expected to ultimately reach as many as 40 teraflops of peak performance. 

IBM and ASTRON, a leading astronomy organization in the Netherlands, announce they will use 

IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer technology as the basis to develop a new type of radio 

telescope capable of looking back billions of years in time.  

IBM reports that scientists at AIST, a leading Japanese research laboratory, will use an IBM 

Blue Gene/L supercomputer to advance their research in proteins, potentially accelerating 

breakthroughs in drug design. Expected to be installed in February 2005, the Blue Gene/L 

system will consist of four racks, with a peak processing speed of 22.8 trillion calculations per 

second (22.8 teraflops). Blue Gene/L will be 24 times more powerful and use a fraction of the 

floor space compared to the current computer systems installed at the AIST's Computational 

Biology Research Center.  

Company researchers at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., 

develop a simple, low cost process to make extraordinarily thin films of semiconductor materials 

that allows electrical charges to move through them about 10 times more easily than had been 

reported for all other similar approaches. A significant scientific milestone, such an increase can 

lead to a broad array of low cost electronics and new pervasive computing applications.  

IBM reports that the University at Buffalo Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics of the State 

University of New York will use an IBM supercomputer and research expertise to study the 

structure and behavior of human proteins. The outcome of the research could lead to more 

targeted drugs to treat diseases as cancer, Alzheimer s, AIDS and multiple sclerosis. The new 

supercomputer, capable of a peak performance of more than 1.32 teraflops, will consist of a 

cluster of 266 IBM eServer BladeCenter HS20 systems, each with two 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon  

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