IBM Lands $325M Contracts for Supercomputers in National Labs

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded IBM contracts valued at $325 million to develop and deliver the world’s most advanced “data centric” supercomputing systems at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

IBM said its new systems will employ a “data centric” approach that puts computing power everywhere data resides, minimizing data in motion and energy consumption. These OpenPOWER-based systems are expected to offer five to 10 times better performance on commercial and high-performance computing applications compared to the current systems at the labs, while being more than five times more energy efficient.

The “Sierra” supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore and “Summit” supercomputer at Oak Ridge will each have a peak performance well in excess of 100 petaflops balanced with more than five petabytes of dynamic and flash memory to help accelerate the performance of data centric applications. IBM’s design will be capable of moving data to the processor, when necessary, at more than 17 petabytes per second (which is equivalent to moving over 100 billion photos on Facebook in a second).

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