IBM sends 10-petaflop supercomputer

IBM has done a deal with the US Department of Energy. 
It's giving the department use of its next-generation supercomputer to help  design electric car batteries and study climate change. 

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will also use the company's next-generation Blue Gene supercomputer to get a better understanding of global climate change and explore the evolution of our universe.

Nicknamed "Mira" the 10-petaflop supercomputer is capable of producing over 500 trillion calculations a second. It is 20 times faster than the supercomputer the team is currently using and can run programs at 10 quadrillion calculations per second. It's built on the next version of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer architecture, called Blue Gene/Q.  

It's a bright spark, according to IBM, which claims a simulation of how a human heart reacts to a medicine would take only two minutes to run on Mira, compared to two years with lesser models. She's no cheap date with a price tag of  $50 million, plus another $4 million to $5 million annually to pay for her electricity bills. 

"We're not out just to prove that our supercomputer is number one," Mike Good, software developer for advanced systems at the Rochester plant told eWeek. "We want to come out with systems that are innovative, but also have the ability to solve the world's problems in a real way." 


                                                                                                                         (www.techeye.net)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sphero team hacks together an Android controlled blender

Image
    Having won the AT&T developer hackathon just before CES this year, the Sphero developer team decided that their booth was the perfect place to create an Android-controlled blender. To accomplish this, the team took one of their Sphero robots and rigged it up to the blender in less than 20 minutes. The Orbotix team has a history of having a good time. These robotics professionals view taking things apart and messing with them as downtime, which is one of the reasons their Sphero product is so developer friendly. As the team celebrates 20 apps that interact with the Sphero directly at CES this year, they felt it was necessary to demonstrate that the hardware used in their little robots can do just about anything. To accomplish this the team invited me to come to their booth and help hack a Sphero onto a blender. Well, I say help, but really I just held tools for Sphero founder Adam Wilson while he did all the work. Since Sphero robots are sealed within their ...
Read more