IBM Builds Europe's fastest supercomputer in Germany

IBM THINKS THE GERMANS are just über and plan to build Europe's most süper powerful züper computer at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ), by upgrading an existing machine to petaflops level.

Funding for the groß BlueGene/P cluster machine will be channeled in from the German Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Research of Northrhine-Westfalia.

The upgraded süpercomputer will have precisely 294,912 PowerPC 450 cores, clocked at exactly 850 MHz, all fitted efficiently four to a server node in perfectly aligned SMP configuration, meticulously taking up 72 racks. All of this to try and speed its way down the data autobahn to over one petaflops.

Pic courtesy of julich.de

Additional specs for the Wunder Machine include 144 terabytes of main memory running on 2.2 megawatts and yielding 455 megaflops per watt of power efficiency. IBM reckons its new Liebchen will also boast 5.1 GB/sec of network bandwidth, have a network latency of 160 nanoseconds and link up to six petabytes of storage. It will also purportedly use a water cooling system set to cut air conditioning bills by 91 per cent.

Professor Thomas Lippert, lead scientist of the Julich supercomputing center noted that "with speeds over a Petaflop, this new Julich-based süpercomputer offers the processing ability of more than 50,000 laptop computers". Lippert added that, "in addition to raw power, this new system will be among the most energy efficient in the world."

The über süper düper süpercomputer will be formally named at an opening ceremony some time in the summer of 2009 when the box goes live. µ