Posted on Tuesday, December 08 2009 @ 18:21 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
IBM announced its Power7 processor will be used in what may become world's fastest supercomputer. The University of Illinois plans to use the Power7 CPU in a system that will theoretically be capable of achieving 10 petaflops, about ten times as much as the computing power offered by the fastest supercomputer today.
Though not aspiring to artificial intelligence, the IBM Blue Waters project supercomputer, like the HAL 9000 series, will be able to do massively complex calculations in an instant and, like HAL, be built in Urbana-Champaign. It is being housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus specifically for the computer that will theoretically be capable of achieving 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today. (A petaflop is 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of supercomputer performance.)
Part of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, it will be the largest publicly accessible supercomputer in the world when it's turned on sometime in 2011.
More info
at CNET.
