14 DAY TRIAL // IBM recently announced the imminent completion of two new supercomputer projects, as part of its nine-year CRM contract with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
According to IBM, the two new supercomputers are supposed to go online sooner than expected, and once they are fully operational, the primary and backup systems will occupy the 36th and 37th positions on the top 500 list of world's fastest supercomputers. Currently, the top spot on the list belongs to IBM's Blue Gene/L system, installed at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, CA.
The two new supercomputers are said to use 160 IBM System p575 server modules, with each of them powered by 16 1.9GHz Power 5+ processors. In addition, each supercomputer features as much as 160 terabytes of disk storage space, thanks to IBM's DS4800 included systems.
Being capable of 14 teraflops (trillion calculations per second), the two machines will easily sort through 240 million global weather observations per day. Primarily, these new models will connect to six weather satellites that NOAA launched in 2006, in order to better understand the flow of the planet's jet streams and the effect they have on storm systems.
IBM also announced that it is already building a supercomputer for the Max Planck Society in Munich, Germany. The device will provide research support for the department of natural sciences, as well as for those focused on social sciences and humanities. Set to go online in 2008, the supercomputer will be able to process 100 teraflops (the fastest supercomputer - Blue Gene/L system - is capable of 280.6 teraflops.), offering 20 times the application performance of the facility's current supercomputer.