IBM to build Supercomputers

IBM has announced that it has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of Energy to build the world's most powerful supercomputers. The contract is part of a Department of Energy contract worth $290 million to build two supercomputers, to be located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. Computer scientists are encouraged by this announcement and claim that the new wave of supercomputers is evidence of a reinvigorated industry that is pushing to reach computer speeds of a petaflop - a thousand trillion mathematical operations a second - by the end of this decade. The supercomputer industry hit a low in the 1990s with the advent of decentralized processing in smaller servers and networks. Cray Inc. has reportedly announced a new, more powerful design known as the Cray X1.

The first of the supercomputer IBM machines, which is named Blue Gene/L, will be made of 130,000 advanced IBM-manufactured microprocessors and could reach peak computing speeds as high as 360 trillion mathematical operations a second. This would be more than ten times the speed of what is currently the world's fastest supercomputer, the Earth Simulator, built by Japanese owned NEC.