IBM has landed a contract to build a new supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Defense. This supercomputer will be used for war simulation, weather forecasting among other things. IBM said that the supercomputer will consists of 368 computers, with 3,000 64-bit processors. Maybe this new supercomputer will take the number one spot from Japan's Earth Simulator Center.
IBM Corp. said it had been selected to build a supercomputer for the U.S. Department of Defense that would be used by the military for war simulation, weather forecasting and other applications. The computer will be deployed at the Naval Oceanographic Office Major Shared Resource Center in Mississippi, IBM said. IBM did not disclose the exact financial terms of the deal but said it was valued in tens of millions of dollars.
The supercomputer consists of 368 powerful computers connected together with a total of about 3,000 64-bit microprocessors made by IBM. The supercomputer would run on IBM's Unix operating system -- the AIX. "This is a race horse," said Debra Goldfarb, vice president of strategy and products for IBM's Deep Computing unit. She said the purchase shows IBM's commitment to building powerful and sophisticated computers for the Defense Department." The system will perform at a peak speed of 20 teraflops, or 20 trillion mathematical operations per second. That means the supercomputer will be able to accomplish in just one second what it would take a person with a calculator 1.2 million years.
News source: Reuters
