IBM to build Europe's most powerful supercomputer

The petaflop system will use 295,000 processors in 72 racks

IBM has announced plans to build Europe's most powerful supercomputer, which will be installed at the Forschungszentrum Juelich research centre in Germany.

The petaflop system will include nearly 295,000 Power 450 850MHz processors in 72 racks, and over 144TB of memory.

"Supercomputers of this performance level are universal key technology instruments to solve the most complex and urgent scientific problems in many areas," said Professor Achim Bachem, chairman of Forschungszentrum Juelich.

"Scientists of all disciplines use supercomputers to identify climate change, conduct research about protein folding in cells, how semiconductors work or how fuel cells can be improved."

The new machine will use a water cooling system that IBM estimates will cut air conditioning bills by 91 per cent.

"With speeds over a petaflop, this new supercomputer offers the processing ability of more than 50,000 laptop computers," said Professor Thomas Lippert, lead scientist of the Juelich supercomputing centre.

"In addition to raw power, this new system will be among the most energy efficient in the world."

The system will be able to store up to six petabytes of data with a network bandwidth of 5.1Gbit/s. It is expected to go live this summer.