IBM Shifts Gears, Turns to ‘Data Centric’ Supercomputers

Instead of sporting faster processors, the company's new machines are designed for more efficient computation that doesn't need to move information as much.

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After years of focusing on speed, IBM is shifting gears to build more efficient, "data centric" supercomputers with Rochester at the center of creating this next generation of machines.

"We're kind of re-setting what's most important," said Andy Schram, IBM's project executive for high-performance computing and exascale programs. "Many realize just going faster doesn't help them as much as more efficient use of the machine."

Businesses are drowning in the waves of data being created by today's Information Society. That's making information management and analysis more valuable than just speed. IBM estimates that the world is generating more than 2.5 billion gigabytes of data every day. That's roughly the equivalent to 250 million football fields full of books.

Instead of sporting faster processors to move data around quicker, these new OpenPOWER machines are designed for more efficient computation that doesn't need to move the information as much. It uses NVIDIA's graphics processing unit (GPU) technology for parallel processing in tandem with the serial processing by the central processing unit.

That's the strategy that helped IBM win the $325 million federal contract to build two next-generation super computers, Summit and Sierra, for the U.S. Department of Energy. They are being purchased for the Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

"This is the beginning," said Schram of IBM's new computers. He and the rest of the IBM team have been working on landing this massive contract for the past 18 months.

The early building and testing of these new machines will happen in Rochester and they will be manufactured in Guadalajara, Mexico.

With partners in its OpenPower open source network, IBM is slated to install these successors to the Blue Gene and Roadrunner super computers in 2017 to 2018. The installs, which will include teams from Rochester, will take place simultaneously.

"It will be a significant install that will take about nine months to a year. It'll be a huge effort," he said

Summit and Sierra will be built around its Power processor, which IBM has made an open source technology through the OpenPower Foundation. IBM's partners, Mellanox and NVIDIA, will help with these new high performance machines. They are expected to perform five to 10 times better that current systems.

While these two systems are being put together specially for the Dept. of Energy, the individual parts will all be commercially available to any business customer. Schram explain that IBM is trying to move away from custom building individual systems.

"The beauty of the systems being developed for Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge is that the core technologies are available today to organizations of many sizes across many industries," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems and Technology Group.

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