Rice University and IBM yesterday (2012.03.30) announced a partnership to build the first award-winning IBM Blue Gene supercomputer in Texas. This new computing capability will speed the search for new sources of energy, new ways of maximizing current energy sources, new cancer drugs and new routes to personalized medicine.
Rice faculty will use the Blue Gene to further their own research and to collaborate with academic and industry partners on a broad range of science and engineering fields related to energy, geophysics, basic life sciences, cancer research, personalized medicine and more.
Rice also announced a related collaboration agreement with the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in Brazil to initiate the shared administration and use of the Blue Gene supercomputer, which allows both institutions to share the benefits of the new computing resource. USP is Brazil's largest institution of higher education and research, and the agreement represents an important bond between Rice and USP.
Rice's new Blue Gene supercomputer, which has yet to be named, is slated to become operational in May. It is based on IBM's POWER processor technology, which was developed in part at the company's Austin, Texas labs. Rice and IBM shared the cost of the system.
Including the Blue Gene/P, Rice has partnered with IBM to launch three new supercomputers during the past two years that have more than quadrupled Rice's high-performance computing capabilities. The addition of the Blue Gene/P doubles the number of supercomputing CPU hours that Rice can offer. The six-rack system contains nearly 25,000 processor cores that are capable of conducting about 84 trillion mathematical computations each second. When fully operational, the system is expected to rank among the world's 300 fastest supercomputers as measured by the TOP500 supercomputer rankings.
A Word on Supercomputer & Blue Gene
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| IBM Blue Gene/P Supercomputer |
Unlike your typical desktop or laptop computer, which have a single microprocessor, supercomputers contain thousands or even tens of thousands of processors. This makes them ideal for scientists who study large problems or engineers who models complex systems, because jobs can be divided among all the processors and run in a matter of seconds or minutes rather than weeks or months. Supercomputers are used to simulate things that cannot be reproduced in a laboratory -- like Earth's climate, nuclear weapons, or the collision of galaxies -- and to examine vast databases like those used to map underground oil reservoirs or to develop personalized medical treatments.
High-performance computers like the IBM Blue Gene/P are critical in virtually every discipline of science and engineering. In 2009, President Obama recognized IBM and its Blue Gene family of supercomputers with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the most prestigious award in the United States given to leading innovators for technological achievement.
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