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(SOI) technology and high speed Silicon Germanium chips. The National Medal of Technology 

is the highest honor awarded by the President of the United States to the nation's leading 

innovators. 

For the thirteenth consecutive year, IBM earns more U.S. patents than any other company. The 

2,941 patents issued to IBM in 2005 derive from the innovative work of more than 4,500 

employees.  

IBM pledges open access to key innovations covered by 500 IBM software patents to individuals 

and groups working on open source software. This is the largest pledge ever of patents of any 

kind and represents a major shift in the way IBM manages and deploys its intellectual property 

portfolio.  

The company unveils the world's largest privately owned supercomputer    the Watson Blue 

Gene (BGW) system installed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown 

Heights, N.Y. With a processing speed of 91.29 teraflops, BGW is expected to join its sister 

machine    the Blue Gene/L supercomputer (

see below

) installed at the Lawrence Livermore 

National Laboratory, and currently the world's fastest    as one of the top three supercomputers 

in the world. BGW is comprised of 20 refrigerator sized racks, less than half the size of 

conventional systems of comparable power and has three times the performance. One of the first 

applications to be deployed on BGW will be Blue Matter, the software framework developed as 

part of the science effort within the Blue Gene project at IBM Research. 

The world's foremost supercomputing authority names IBM's Blue Gene/L as the most powerful 

supercomputer in the world, with a sustained performance of 280.6 teraflops. Along with Blue 

Gene/L in the TOP500 list's top three supercomputers are IBM's own Blue Gene Watson system 

at 91.29 teraflops and the recently unveiled ASC Purple supercomputer (

see below

) at the 

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with 63.39 teraflops. 

IBM reports that it has successfully demonstrated ASC Purple on time and beyond performance 

objectives. The system is the result of a long term collaboration between the U.S. Department of 

Energy's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program (known earlier as ASCI) and 

IBM, with the U.S. Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL) as the lead lab. LLNL says that the 

Purple machine will conduct simulations of nuclear weapons performance. In August, the first of 

25 trucks loaded with the ASC Purple supercomputer leaves IBM's Poughkeepsie, N.Y., plant 

and heads west to its final destination at LLNL in California. 

The U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, in collaboration with the University of 

Colorado, acquires an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer with a peak performance of 5.7 teraflops. 

The supercomputer will be used to simulate ocean, weather, and climate phenomena that impact 

agricultural output, heating oil prices and global warming.  

IBM and The Ecole Polytechnique F

e

d

e

rale de Lausanne announce a major joint research 

initiative    the Blue Brain project    to take brain research to a new level. Over the next two 

years, scientists from both organizations will work together using the huge computational 

capacity of IBM's eServer Blue Gene supercomputer, to create a detailed model of the circuitry 

in the neocortex. 

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