Friday, March 30, 2012

IBM Blue Gene Supercomputer Heads To Texas

IBM said today that it is in a partnership with Rice University to build the first, IBM Blue Gene supercomputer in Texas. The supercomputers--which are among the fastest supercomputers in the world--will be used by Rice University faculty to further research and engineering efforts. Rice said it is also collaborating with the University of Sao Paulo on the supercomputer, which will allow both institutions to share the computing resource. IBM said the new Blue Gene supercomputer is set to become operational in May, and is based on IBM's POWER processor technology, which was developed in part by IBM's Austin Texas labs. The new supercomputer is expected to be used in research for everything from astronomy and weather prediction to particle physics and biotechnology. The Blue Gene system being installed at Rice is epected to have more than 25,000 processor cores, and will be capable of conducting 84 trillion mathematical computations each second. IBM said it expects the new system to be ranked on the Top 500 ranking of the most powerful supercomputers in the world; a significant number of IBM Blue Gene supercomputers populate that list.