Supercomputers/Systems/Blue Protein
Japan · operational · hpc
Blue Protein
Also known as CBRC Blue Protein; AIST Blue Gene
Operated by AIST .
Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- 18.20 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 22.94 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 79.3%
- Cores
- 8,192
- Power
- 89 kW
- Per watt
- 0.2 GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - IBM Blue Gene system, 4,096 compute nodes and 128 I/O nodes | IBM | - | Verified | cbrc3.cbrc.pj.aist.go.jptop500.org |
| CPU | IBM PowerPC 440 700MHz CPUs PowerPC · 2C · 0.7 GHz · 130 nm · 13 W IBM PowerPC 440 700 MHz, 8,192 processors | IBM | 8,192 verified | Verified | cbrc3.cbrc.pj.aist.go.jptop500.org |
| Storage | - GPFS file system on 8 xSeries 345 file servers with 20 TB of disk | IBM | - | Reported | cbrc3.cbrc.pj.aist.go.jp |
The read
IBM Blue Gene system of the Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC) at AIST, used for molecular dynamics of disease-related and drug-target proteins and for protein-ligand docking and binding free-energy estimation. The CBRC page lists 8,192 processors (dual 700 MHz PowerPC per node), 4,096 compute nodes at 1,024 per rack plus 128 I/O nodes at 32 per rack, 22.9 teraflops peak in virtual node mode and 11.4 in coprocessor mode, 18.2 teraflops Linpack, 2 TB of memory at 512 MB per node, and a GPFS file system of eight xSeries 345 servers with 20 TB of disk; the page does not give an installation date. TOP500 lists the same 8,192 cores of PowerPC 440 at 18.20 TFlop/s Rmax in its first entries (later 18.66), 22.94 peak and a stated 89 kW, ranked 8th in June 2005 and 395th in June 2009, its last list. Same hardware generation and size as the KEK machine kek-bluegene-system-b, and the same chip as bluegene-l.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Change history
- 2026-10-17 Blue Protein added from its source pages
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| cbrc3.cbrc.pj.aist.go.jp | names system, part and count | IBM PowerPC 440 700MHz · counts: 8192 |
| top500.org | names system, part and count | IBM PowerPC 440 700MHz · counts: 8192 |
Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.
Further reading
Operating a supercomputer
Acceptance testing, why "installed" and "in production" are six months apart, and the machine lifecycle.
Inside a node
Latency-optimised versus throughput-optimised processors, NUMA, and the end of the host-to-device copy.
Storage and I/O
Parallel file systems, why checkpointing dominates the write load, and the metadata failure mode nobody expects.