The first science project earmarked for Blue Gene is to model folding of human proteins.
But Blue Gene would have a higher purpose than playing games, albeit intellectually challenging games.
There are, in fact, several avenues of research that Blue Gene will be able to explore.
Blue Gene will speed along at 1, 000 teraflops and will also be used to attack biological problems.
But it can't compete with IBM's work in progress, Blue Gene, unless it's ten times that fast.
IBM's vice-president of systems research, there are several areas in which Blue Gene technology could be applied.
Eliza's technology also could be used in Blue Gene, IBM's supercomputer under development and aimed for biotechnology research.
Blue Gene will allow some of these new ideas to be tried out.
The process will involve building a Blue Gene supercomputer with 8, 000 processors that can roar along at 23 trillion operations per second.
Blue Gene is undoubtedly an ambitious and even risky project.
Blue Gene could simulate heating a protein, to see how stable it is, or could apply random mutations to a protein, to see how its ability to fold is affected.
Researchers have not yet chosen which protein they will fold when Blue Gene is finished a few years down the road, but Horn said that simple proteins will be tested before then.
Blue Gene will be deemed a success, says Dr Royyuru, if it can make progress on any of these fronts at the same time as providing general insights into the dynamics of the folding process.
If the machine works as researchers think it will, chess masters ought to look out -- Blue Gene would be 1, 000 times more powerful than the Deep Blue machine that defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
He uses an improbable combination of green algae, blue lasers, gene therapy and fiber optics to map neural circuits deep inside the brain with a precision that has never been possible before.
He cofounded the new firm with John Leach (also of Blue Martini as well as founder of Incite Retail) and Gene Davis ( worked at NASA, Blue Martini, ClioMusic, SeeSaw Networks, PeopleSoft and Red Pepper, all previous Zweben ventures, plus Fogbreak Software and Tealeaf technologies).
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Belgian blue cows, which lack the myostatin gene, are so covered with bulky, rippling muscles that they look like something out of a bovine superhero cartoon.
Instead of running complicated tests to see if they had managed to insert a gene into an organism, scientists could just shine a blue light and watch for the glow.
Could blue eyes be another example of the same phenomenon "culture-gene co-evolution"?
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Codon Chief Danner and John Mulligan, the founder of Blue Heron, have started an industry trade organization that will prevent misuse by flagging potentially dangerous gene sequences and doing checks on researchers who request DNA transcripts.
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