Super computer Mira knocked Tianhe-1a

Argonne, the national lab of the US Department of Energy, began building IBM's supercomputer into one of the most powerful supercomputers today, knocking out Tianhe-1a's leading position after just a moment. Short time holding position.

China's Thien Ha-1A supercomputer will soon cede Mira's position.
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According to IBM, the company's new supercomputer model will be called Mira, capable of performing 10 petaflops operations per second and will be operational by 2012. It will be built on the next version. of Blue Gene supercomputer architecture from IBM, also known as Blue Gene / Q.

Through the sponsorship of the National Ministry of Science, Argonne is a place that allows governments, researchers, and academia to access supercomputers to study large-scale projects and projects. develope. Supercomputers are used to serve the fields of chemical calculations, aerodynamics, material science, alternative energy and other industries.

Last month, US President Barack Obama stressed that using supercomputers as a way for the US to maintain its economic competitive advantage. He refers to the progress of other countries, such as China, who have done their own supercomputing work.

The 10 petaflop computational performance figure has far surpassed that of China's Thien Ha-1A (Tianhe-1a), which holds the world's largest supercomputing position today with 2.67 petaflops performance in super-engine Top500. Calculate the world's fastest vote every 2 years.

According to IBM's prediction, Mira supercomputers can be used to cut down on the time it takes to run computer models and even execute jobs that were too big even for the largest computers. world. It can study the human body's drug response on computers in about 2 minutes, 5 times faster than today's supercomputers. Faster speeds allow the scientific research industry and academies to conduct further research to offer new and innovative products to the market.

By 2012, Mira will be one of three American supercomputers from IBM capable of performing calculations of 10 petaflops or larger. IBM will also release a supercomputer model running at 20 petaflops for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) of the US Department of Energy called Sequoia. The company will also fund the Blue Waters system running at 10 petaflops for the University of Illinois at Urbana, part of the National Center for supercomputing applications.

Mira includes 750,000 IBM PowerPC A2 processors running at 1.6 Ghz. Each processor will perform a calculation and be placed in 1,024 different brackets, each with 128 128 I / O adjustments to be dedicated to moving data in the calculation. Each control button will be equipped with 8 or 16GB of memory, gathering up to 750 terabytes of system memory. The conversion of data will be through connecting IBM 5D Torus with 40 gigabit per second bandwidth.

This supercomputer will run the open source Compute Node Lightweight operating system, a modified version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The system will be cooled by water and consume an average of 60 kW for each rack.

IBM did not disclose Mira's price, although they said that Argonne bought the supercomputer with funding of up to $ 180 million.

Turek, an IBM supercomputer expert, said: ' While this supercomputer system is capable of executing 10 petaflops, Blue Gene / Q supercomputers can operate up to 50 petaflops, even more '.

IBM has developed Blue Gene architecture since 1993 as part of a US $ 100 million development effort with the LLNL. Research efforts to create a supercomputer architecture that is both energy efficient and efficient, has the ability to expand larger supercomputers.