IBM will build the world's most powerful supercomputer

The race for global supercomputer power is increasingly fierce as the German Bavarian Academy of Sciences announced that it has signed a contract with IBM to produce a supercomputer that can make 3 petaflops, potentially becoming The world's most powerful computer after its completion in 2012.

Columbia's supercomputers at NASA at Ames Advanced Supercomputers Research Center. (Photo of NASA)

This supercomputer called SuperMUC will be run by the Leibniz Supercomputing Center of the institute in Garching (Germany) and used to serve European researchers in the field of medical and physical research. celestial bodies as well as other sciences.

Mr. Martin Jetter, IBM Board Chairman in Germany, affirmed " with this supercomputer, the research community in Germany and Europe will reach the top of the international competition. "

This system will use 14,000 Intel Xeon processors running on IBM System x iDataPlex servers. SuperMUC will also adopt a new type of cooling developed by IBM called Aquasar.

This measure will use hot water to cool the processors, a design that will save 40% of cooling power by IBM.

When completed, SuperMUC will be near the top of the list of the world's most powerful supercomputing Top500 published every two years.

This supercomputer will have to compete with two supercomputers with up to 20 petaflops of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Research Laboratory.

These two agencies are all funded by the US Department of Energy and are expected to put into operation their systems in 2012.

In the recently published Top500 list, China's Thien Ha-1A supercomputer tops with 2.67 petaflops (1 petaflop equals 1 million billion calculations per second).