14 DAY TRIAL // There seems to be no end in sight for the race to build some of the world's fastest supercomputers, and now IBM has revealed the fact that it will actually create yet another such uber-powerful computing solution for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.
Set to be operational by 2012, the supercomputer, nicknamed “Mira” will be built on IBM's Blue Gene/Q platform and will attain quite an impressive level of performance, of around 10 petaflops, that will virtually make it twice as fast as today's fastest supercomputer.
The Argonne laboratory already has a supercomputer installed and running, the Intrepid, an IBM Blue Gene/P machine capable of producing over 500 trillion calculations a second, but their future machine, the Mira, will be 20 times faster, running programs at 10 quadrillion calculations a second.
That's possible due to the fact that the IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer will come equipped with no less than 750,000 computing cores, while in the same time apparently being one of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world, thanks to a combination of innovative new chip designs and extremely efficient water cooling.
In fact, the laboratory believes that Mira will represent an important step in the evolution towards exascale-class computers that will be faster than petascale-class computers by a factor of a thousand.
"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," the researcher concluded.
Of course, there's no word on just how much the Mira will cost, but, given the fact that we're talking about an undertaking that will certainly help scientific research, price is not even that important, after all.