L & P Machine, Inc. history

PAUL’S was founded by Paul L. Cler in 1951.

He started his career at Hawker Siddeley Aviation Ltd, Coventry in 1956.

In 1963 he moved to the National Engineering Laboratory, East Kilbride, Glasgow.

In 1969, while at the National Engineering Laboratory, he obtained a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Strathclyde.

In 1979, after going to school and working in machine shops for several years, Kurt Wagner purchased a few machines and began his business offering machining services to Philadelphia area companies.

Whereas IBM’s previous champ, IBM Deep Blue ®, had 32 processors and could calculate about 200 million potential chess moves per second in its historic six-game victory over a chess grand master in 1997, Blue Gene/L used 131,000 processors to routinely handle 280 trillion operations every second.

He retired formally in 1998 but remained professionally active in the fields of metal fatigue and fracture mechanics, and is affiliated to University College London as a visiting professor.

When a small team of IBM engineers and scientists began developing the prototype for the Blue Gene ®/L in 1999, they were looking to make a radical departure from how supercomputers were being designed at the time.

When Blue Gene ®/P, the family’s second generation, was unveiled in 2007, it nearly tripled the performance of Blue Gene/L, immediately becoming the most energy-efficient and space-saving computing package built, at that point in time.

In September 2009, United States President Barack Obama recognized IBM and the Blue Gene family of supercomputers with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the country's most prestigious award given to leading innovators for technological achievement.