IBM Donates Blue Gene/P Supercomputer to Spur Scientific and Socio-economic Growth i

IBM Donates Blue Gene/P Supercomputer to Spur Scientific and Socio-economic Growth i

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it will donate a 14-teraflop Blue Gene/P system to the Meraka Institute which will be hosted by the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town, South Africa, in an effort to spark scientific and socio-economic progress in the region.

The $2 million Blue Gene supercomputer — able to make 14 trillion floating point calculations per second — will be, by far, the most powerful supercomputer on the African continent. It will be available free of charge to any qualifying African institution for use on advanced scientific projects. The application process, currently being developed by IBM and the CHPC, will be made public before the system is installed early in 2008 with the goal of granting access to any African institution focused on social, economic, and environmental issues and skills development on the African continent.

The donation was prompted by an extensive series of meetings on economic development opportunities in Africa recently convened by IBM as part of its annual Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) process. More than 150 global business, academic and government leaders agreed that building scientific and technical capability within Africa is one of the fundamental keys to growing its economy.

“Unlike simple donations of cash or even laptop computers, access to advanced supercomputing capabilities immediately places the African scientific community on an even playing field with the rest of the world,” said Mark Dean, an IBM Fellow and Research Vice President who brokered the donation. “With this Blue Gene, the CHPC can tackle large-scale, complex computing problems that are pertinent to the African people, including infectious disease treatments, management and prevention, climate modeling, alternative energy and fuel systems, and plant genomics.”

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