IBM lands deal to build 10 petaflop cluster

IBM has unveiled plans to build a 10 petaflop Blue Gene/Q supercomputing cluster in the US, which is slated to go online in 2012 at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.

Argonne said that the Mira system will sport 750,000 processing cores and 750TB of memory.

The cluster will be made available to commercial, academic and government research projects around the world.

"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, Argonne National Laboratory associate laboratory director for computing, environment and life sciences.

"Argonne's new IBM supercomputer will help address the critical demand for complex modelling and simulation capabilities, which are essential to improving our economic prosperity and global competitiveness."

The 10 petaflop system will be capable of performing 10 quadrillion calculations per second. The current leader of the Top500 supercomputing list, China's Tianhe-1A, reaches speeds of 2.57 petaflops.

The cluster will replace Intrepid, a Blue Gene/P system which went online in 2007, which ranks 13th on the Top500 list with a top speed of 458 teraflops.

IBM estimates that, at its top speed, Mira will perform roughly 20 times faster than Intrepid.