University of Illinois plan to build the world fastest supercomputer is underway and this time IBM is at the rescue. Sometimes during the next year, IBM is going to launch its new processing chip that will factor into building this potential supercomputer. The supercomputer center located in the university is known for hosting the magnificent HAL 9000 supercomputer. The name of the new supercomputer project is the IBM Blue Waters Project. As expected, the new project is going to take place in Urbana, Illinois which was the same host for the HAL 9000. The new computer would be able to perform huge numbers of complicated calculations in no time. In addition, the supercomputer is expected to perform 10 times faster than the fastest existing supercomputer. The launching of the actual supercomputer will be sometime during the year of 2011. In the following paragraphs, a brief presentation of the supercomputer components and enhanced features will take place.
Supercomputers contains a big number of microprocessors integrated together to work on complex operations. The name of the potential chip is Power7; this chip take on many features of the flagship Power chip (a chip used in one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, The Roadrunner supercomputer). One powerful feature is that it integrates eight processing cores into the chip; each core with the ability to take upon four tasks which eventually make the chip a virtual 32-core processors. In addition, instead of using the static RAM memory, IBM implemented a new technology called E-DRAM which limits the number of transistors to 1.2 billion instead of an expected 2+ billion transistors for the static RAM memory. One thing to mention about this chip is its speed; it is not yet decided whether to use a a 3GHz or 4GHz which is slower than the latest Power6 chip which was operating at a speed of 5GHz.
The Blue Waters Supercomputers is funded by the National Science Foundation. IBM goal is to potentially hook 16,384 Power7 chips together that supposedly could bring performance to 16 petaflops. However, IBM continues to say that realistically the supercomputer could bring about 10 petaflops but will work with 1 petaflops on software applications. This supercomputer is said to attract big companies with massive performance needs such as Boeing, GM, and Ford. Interestingly enough, IBM plans to embed the Power7 chip in selected commercial products. This basically means that Intel would have to get its weapons ready for battle.
Supercomputers have been evident for a long time but with technology reaching its peak, it seems that more in more are interested in developing them. The more competition, the better products are going to be and may the best processor win!
