IBM seeks to build world's fastest supercomputer

BIG BLUE will cobble together what is expected to be the fastest supercomputer in the world for the US National Science Foundation, it was revealed by mistake last week on a government web site.

The speed target for this machine will be one petaflop, which is a thousand trillion floating-point calculations per second. The Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list shows the currently fastest supercomputer as IBM's Blue Gene/L, containing over 131,000 processors and capable of a sustained speed of just over 280 trillion operations per second (teraflops), or about one quarter of this projected future system's performance.

Even allowing for the increased speed of the future version of IBM's Power CPU likely to be used in this machine, it will probably require on the order of 250,000 processors. Add in the memory and storage devices that will be associated with this machine and it's easy to predict that another multi-megawatt power plant will be needed somewhere in the US midwest to support it. And when it's running in the wintertime, Chicago might even see a slight reduction in lake-effect snowfall due to the additional heat pumped into the region by this machine.

The machine will be built for use by the DoD's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and installed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign just outside Chicago. It will focus on a few Grand Challenge science problems, such as global weather modeling (along with whatever else DARPA wants, of course).

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