IBM Dominates Global Supercomputing, Commanding Leadership for the US

IBM Dominates Global Supercomputing, Commanding Leadership for the US

The world’s foremost supercomputer ranking authority, TOP500, today named an IBM supercomputing system as the world’s most powerful supercomputer in the world. IBM’s Blue Gene/L tops the list with a sustained performance of 136.8 Teraflops, or trillions of floating point calculations per second.The system developed with IBM’s primary partner, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, is being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in California and is planned to grow to a 360 Teraflop Blue Gene/L supercomputer when completed this summer. IBM’s new Watson Blue Gene system, installed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York, debuts at number two with 91.29 TF as the world’s most powerful privately owned supercomputer.

“The Blue Gene architecture will run certain problems at tremendous speeds, ten times faster than previously possible. Once complete, the National Nuclear Security Administration will have available the kind of national security tool needed to rapidly analyze urgent nuclear weapons stockplie aging issues. It will support broader simulation codes to support certification of our stockpile,” said Dimitri Kusnezov, Director of the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing program.

“Even as we are bringing the machine to its full configuration, we are doing science critical to NNSA’s mission to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. This represents a great team effort led by NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program,” said Dona Crawford, associate director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Working with our partners at IBM, Los Alamos and Sandia, we are simultaneously advancing scientific discovery and the high-performance computing that makes it possible. The capabilities we are now beginning to apply to our national security missions will also be applicable in other domains.”

Read the complete Press Release