The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced that they will each purchase a next-generation IBM supercomputer that will run at up to 150 petaflops on November 14 to help them sort through enormous amounts of data and to work toward advances in science, engineering, and national security.
"Today's announcement marks a shift from traditional supercomputing approaches that are no longer viable as data grows at enormous rates," Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of the IBM Systems and Technology Group, stated.
IBM was given $325 million to set up the world's most advanced supercomputing systems, as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's "Coral" project, which can perform 150 million billion floating-point operations per second, at least five times as fast as the current leading US supercomputer, the Titan system at the ORNL.
According to IBM, researchers just don't have enough time or energy to wade through so much data. Which is where the tech giant's new "data centric" method comes in.
"IBM's Data Centric approach is a new paradigm in computing, marking the future of open computing platforms and capable of addressing the growing rates of data," Rosamilia said.
"The beauty of the systems being developed for Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge is that the core technologies are available today to organizations of many sizes across many industries."
Julia White, manager of a grant program that awards supercomputing time at the ORNL and Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois says, "There is a real importance of having the larger systems, and not just to do the same problems over and over again in greater detail."
"You can actually take science to the next level," she added.
While an IBM spokeswoman confirmed to PCMag that the installation of the room-sized systems is expected to begin in 2017, with full user operations planned for 2018.
