According to James Bamford's "Body of Secrets: anatomy of the ultra-secret national security agency" p. 608; The ultimate goal of Blue Gene is to solve a puzzle of a different sort from those at NSA -- although NSA may also secretly be a customer. Blue Gene's singular objective is to try and model the way a human protein folds into a particular shape. Because proteins are the molecular workhorses of the human body, it is essential to discover their molecular properties. In a sense, Blue Gene is like NSA's old RAMs, which were designed to attack a specific encryption system.
When completed, Blue Gene will consist of sixty-four computing towers standing six feet high and covering an area forty feet by forty feet. Inside will be a mind-boggling one million processors. The target speed is a petaflop.
When NSA crosses the petaflop threshold, if it hasn't already, it is unlikely that the rest of the world will know. By 2005 the SRC, with years of secret, highly specialized development accululated, will likely be working with computers operating at exaflop speeds - a quintillion operations a second - and pushing for zettaflop and even yottaflop machines, capable of a septillion (10 [to the 24th power]) operations every time a second hand jumps. Beyond yottaflop, numbers have not yet been named. "It is the greatest play box in the world," marveled one agency veteran of the NSA's technology capability. "They've got one of everything." ...
