By The race is back, and IBM is now beating the World’s fastest SuperComputer to grab the crown, which at the moment belongs to China’s Tianhe-1A .
United States is now owns the fastest SuperComputer, pushing China to the second place, of course leaving Google Plex aside. Very recently, China had pushed Cray XT5 Jaguar to the Rank 2. Although, you can Build yourself Supercomputers, it does cost millions when its built as a nation’s pride.
The Tianhe-1A, meaning Milky Way, was designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China. It is the work of 200 scientists, that makes groundbreaking performance record of 2.507 petaflops, or quatrillion calculations per second, making it the fastest system in the world today. Ordinarily the computer runs at 563.1 teraflops, or trillion calculations per second.
Lets welcome Blue Gene/Q, aka “Mira”, IBM’s latest and greatest supercomputer boasting a ten-petaflops of raw power. Mira is capable of running programs at ten quadrillion calculations a second.
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To give you an idea of how powerful this supercomputer is IBM’s statement tries to explain it:
“If every man, woman and child in the United States performed one calculation each second, it would take them almost a year to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second.”
Where would the Most Powerful SuperComputer be used?
Mira would be employed with US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, where it’ll be used to tackle 16 projects in particular that were drawn from a pool of proposals to gain access to her capabilities. We’re told that these include a range of initiatives — from reducing energy inefficiencies in transportation and developing advanced engine designs to spurring advances in energy technologies — and in time, it could lead to exascale-class computers “that will be faster than petascale-class computers by a factor of a thousand.”
Here are notes from IBM’s press release:
WASHINGTON – 08 Feb 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will use IBM’s next-generation Blue Gene supercomputer to enable significant advances in areas such as designing ultra-efficient electric car batteries, understanding global climate change and exploring the evolution of our universe.
The 10-petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, named “Mira”, will be operational in 2012 and made available to scientists from industry, academia and government research facilities around the world.
“Computation and supercomputing are critical to solving some of our greatest scientific challenges, like advancing clean energy and understanding the Earth’s climate,” said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environment and life sciences at Argonne National Laboratory. “Argonne’s new IBM supercomputer will help address the critical demand for complex modeling and simulation capabilities, which are essential to improving our economic prosperity and global competitiveness.”
Argonne to use IBM Blue Gene/Q
Argonne National Laboratory will use IBM’s next-generation Blue Gene/Q supercomputer to stoke economic growth and improve U.S. competitiveness for such challenges as designing electric car batteries, understanding climate change and exploring the evolution of the universe. The 10 petaflop system, named “Mira”, will be twice as fast as today’s fastest supercomputer, providing a strong science and technology engine that will fuel national innovation. Argonne is one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s oldest and largest labs for science and engineering research, located some 20 minutes outside Chicago, IL (Feature Photo Service).
Mira will offer an opportunity for scientists to become more familiar with the capabilities an exascale machine will offer and the programming changes it will require. For example, scientists will have to scale their current computer codes to more than 750,000 individual computing cores, providing them preliminary experience on how scalability might be achieved on an exascale-class system with 100s of millions of cores.
Once Mira is online, the DOE’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) and the ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) programs will award blocks of computing time via a peer-reviewed, competitive process to researchers who are working on scientific challenges that are best addressed by the capabilities of high-performance supercomputers.
Blue Gene is one of 100 Icons of Progress in IBM’s 100 year history because it is a radical departure from the supercomputers of its time, consuming only a fraction of the energy and floor space. The system is part of a collaboration between Argonne, IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Blue Gene’s speed and expandability have enabled industry and the scientific community to address a wide range of complex problems and make more informed decisions.
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