IBM and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have extended a long-running partnership in an effort to enhance America's competitiveness in high-performance computing (HPC).
IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory have announced an extension of their 20-year relationship
that is expected to boost American competitiveness in high-performance
computing.
Through a new agreement, IBM and LLNL have
formed an HPC collaboration called Deep Computing Solutions to take place
within LLNLs High Performance Computing Innovation Center (HPCIC). The HPCIC itself opened
in June 2011. The center was created to help American industry harness the
power of supercomputing to better compete in the global marketplace. Deep
Computing Solutions will bring a new dimension to the HPCIC, adding IBMs
computational science expertise to LLNLs own.
The capabilities of Californias Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory are uniquely suited to boost American industrys
competitiveness in the global marketplace, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein,
(D-Calif.) in a statement. The new collaboration between the Lab and IBM is an
excellent example of using the technical expertise of both the government and
the private-sector to spur innovation and investment in the U.S. economy.
"The strength of supercomputing
facilities like Livermores High Performance Computing Innovation Center offers
a broad range of solutions to energy, environmental and national security
problems. I look forward to following the progress of this new collaboration in
accelerating the development of products and services to maintain the nations
competitive advantage, she said.
Feinstein delivered remarks on the
collaboration at a June 27 Capitol Hill briefing on "Big Data: The New
Natural Resource." The focus of the briefing is how Congress and the Obama
administration can harvest the great new resource of big data to address the
nation's challenges.
Computer and domain science experts from IBM
Research and LLNL will work together with a broad range of American industry
collaborators to devise HPC solutions that can help accelerate the development
of new technologies, products and services. Among areas of interest are applied
energy; green energy, including renewable energy sources; biology; materials
science; fabrication; manufacturing; data management; and informatics.
Maintaining a technological edge over the
competition in the global marketplace is vital to both national security and
the countrys economic prosperity, said Frederick Streitz, director of the
HPCIC, in a statement. Deep Computing Solutions will be an important ingredient
of the HPC Innovation Center, building on IBM and LLNLs mutual experience in
applying HPC to complex technical problems. Together we will help equip U.S.
industry with the tools for technological innovation needed to stay ahead of
the global competition.
Deep Computing Solutions will deploy a
comprehensive range of experienced researchers and developers from both IBM and
LLNL to help develop robust solutions for its clients that can address
enterprise-critical challenges, such as processing very large data sets to fuel
competitive insights, James Sexton, program director of the Computational
Science Center at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, said in a statement.
The potential is to aggressively increase the rate and pace of innovation for
our clients and to deliver significant economic impact as a result.
LLNL has procured a 5-petaflopquadrillion floating-point
operations per secondsystem to support HPCIC and Deep Computing Solutions
efforts as well as unclassified National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
research programs, academic alliances and LLNL institutional science and
technology efforts. Known as Vulcan, the new 24-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q system
based on the IBM POWER architecture will be delivered in summer 2012. Vulcan is
part of the contract that brought Sequoia, the 20-petaflop Blue Gene/Q machine
recently ranked
No. 1 on the TOP500 list of the
worlds fastest supercomputers, to Livermore.
Moreover, the NNSA/LLNL/IBM collaboration has
produced six HPC systems that have been ranked among the worlds most powerful
computers including: The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Blue
Pacific; ASCI White; the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Purple; Blue
Gene/L; Blue Gene/P, Dawn; and Blue Gene/Q, Sequoia. ASCI White, Blue Gene/L
and now Sequoia all attained a No. 1 ranking on the TOP500 list. The Blue Gene
line of supercomputers received a Presidential Medal of Technology and
Innovation from President Obama in 2009.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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