, IBM announced the start of a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding. The project has two main goals: to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large-scale simulation, and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software. This project should enable biomolecular simulations that are orders of magnitude larger than current technology permits. Major areas of investigation include: how to most effectively utilize this novel platform to meet our scientific goals, how to make such massively parallel machines more usable, and how to achieve performance targets, with reasonable cost, through novel machine architectures. This paper provides an overview of the Blue Gene project at IBM Research. It includes some of the plans that have been made, the intended goals, and the anticipated challenges regarding the scientific work, the software application, and the hardware design.

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In this paper, we describe application-specific extensions for fuzzy processing to a general purpose processor. The application-specific instruction set extensions were defined and evaluated using hardware/software codesign techniques. Based on this approach, we have extended the MIPS instruction set architecture with only a few new instructions to significantly speed up fuzzy computation with no increase of the processor cycle time and with only minor increase in chip area. The processor is implemented using a reconfigurable processor core which was designed as a starting point for application-specific processor designs to be used in embedded applications. Performance is presented for three representative applications of varying complexity.Index Terms-Application-specific instruction set, fuzzy processing, fuzzy systems, hardware/software codesign, reconfigurable processor core, subword parallelism.