IBM Secures $325 Million Deal with Department of Energy to Build 2 Supercomputers
IBM has secured a $325 million deal with the Department of Energy to build two massive supercomputers which will be called Sierra and Summit. The supercomputers will be combining a new supercomputing approach from the Big Blue with Nvidia processing accelerators and Mellanox high-speed networking.
IBM and the U.S. government had announced the deal Friday as well as bi-annual supercomputing conferences which will be beginning Monday. The supercomputers will be used to calculate car aerodynamics, predict the performance of new drugs, as well as detect structural weaknesses in airplane designs.
The $325 million will be used to pay for the assemblage of the two machines and will be placed in two separate laboratories. One will be located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennesseeand and will be used for civilian research. The other will be placed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and will be used for nuclear weapons simulation.
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In addition to the $325 million for the supercomputers, the Department of Energy will also be spending $100 million on a program called "FastForward2." The program involves the creation of next-generation, massive-scale supercomputers which will be 20 to 40 times faster than today's models.
DOE secretary Ernest Moniz says it's part of the project called "Coral" and is named after the national laboratories involved: Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Lawrence Livermore.
"We expect that critical supercomputing investments like Coral and FastForward2 will again lead to transformational advancements in basic science, national defense, environmental and energy research that rely on simulations of complex physical systems and analysis of massive amounts of data," Moniz had said in a statement.
