Faster and faster

The Defense Department has agreed to buy a 2,944-processor IBM supercomputer for naval simulations, including war simulation and weather forecasting. 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. The flagship system is a cluster of 386 eight-processor p655 machines, which use IBM's Power4+ processor and its AIX version of Unix, according to IBM. It also includes a 55-terabyte FastT storage system. The system, called Kraken, 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. IBM expects the computer to be ranked among the world's 10 fastest computers when the next list of the top 500 computers is released. IBM is several years into a campaign to topple Hewlett-Packard, the No. 1 company in the high-performance computing market. Big Blue has had some success, returning to the top spot in the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers this June. The Top 500 list of fastest computers is compiled and published twice a year by Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim (Germany). The fastest computer, according to the most recent list, was the Earth Simulator Center in Japan made by NEC Corp. The Navy office is an established supercomputer customer. In 2001, it purchased a Cray SV1ex for the task, and in 2002, added an IBM machine called Blue Ocean.
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