IBM plans to officially announce the creation of a new supercomputer later today, and is expected to rank as one of the fastest on the planet.
The new supercomputer, named the Watson Blue Gene system, was developed in only two months, and has been installed at IBM"s Thomas Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. The 3,000 Watson researchers are already using the computer"s amazing computing power for a variety of scientific studies, which include research in life sciences, materials sciences, and molecular dynamics.
The supercomputer, named Watson Blue Gene, or BGW as it is called at IBM, has a peak processing speed of 115 teraflops. This means that it can produce 115 trillion calculations per second. Its sustained performance is 91.29 trillion calculations per second.The Watson system has 20 computing racks, with about 2,000 processors in each, for a total of 40,000 processors.
The Watson Blue Gene would cost about $40 million for IBM to build a unit for other customers, based on a price of about $2 million processor rack.