14 DAY TRIAL // IBM and the University of Illinois recently announced they have terminated the contract signed between the two parts for the development of the Blue Waters supercomputer, as the former said the costs associated with the development and support of the machine are far too great.
The Blue Waters supercomputer was expected to go online this year, and should have become the fastest machine in the world when completed.
“The University of Illinois and NCSA selected IBM in 2007 as the supercomputer vendor for the Blue Waters project based on projections of future technology development,” said one NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) official.
“The innovative technology that IBM ultimately developed was more complex and required significantly increased financial and technical support by IBM beyond its original expectations.
“NCSA and IBM worked closely on various proposals to retain IBM's participation in the project but could not come to a mutually agreed-on plan concerning the path forward,” concluded the rep.
To date, IBM has shipped three racks of the Blue Waters supercomputer to NCSA, and these will be returned to the company, while the Government Organization will get back the $30 million US paid for the equipment.
The Blue Waters supercomputer was built by using a large number of Power7-powered 2U servers fitted together inside custom racks 30 inches wide and 6 feet deep.
Each one of these nodes included 256 cores, 2TB of memory, and a series of specially designed hub/switch chips, that allowed for up to 2,048 drawers to be connected in order to provide a peak performance of 16 petaflops.
Now that the Blue Waters project has been canceled, NCSA is looking for a new HPC builder to develop a similar supercomputer capable of sustaining petaflop performance. (via The Inquirer)