Talk about a shot in the arm.
Despite its recent struggles, IBM has just landed a massive contract from the United States Department of Energy worth upwards of $325 million. The agreement is for IBM to provide a supply of supercomputers for the department.
IBM was not alone in the deal. IBM will be partnering with Mellanox and Nvidia to provide the federal government with the tools necessary to process the massive amounts of data required to conducted national security procedures.
These new machines are the best the industry has to offer, with IBM saying that this current crop of supercomputers are twice as fast as previous models and all without increased energy consumption.
The names of these computers certainly live up to the size of these machines. They’ve been nicknamed Sierra and Summit by their designers at IBM. These computers are expected to come into operation during 2017 and 2018 at two facilities that are already home to some of the nation’s fastest and most expensive computers: Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The DOE’s spending doesn’t seem to be stopping there either. The department is expected to sink $100 million into the development of faster computers in the future.
Another major component of this project is an elimination of what IBM refers to as data in motion. Data in motion can be defined as connections between various people, files, and processes. IBM has worked to trim down these connections and consolidate data wherever possible. With fewer connections come higher processing speeds. Despite IBM’s success in this area, the DOE must be diligent to reduce the amount of data it produces to avoid these issues in the future. Using the current configuration, the computers are thought to be capable of speeds up to 75 gigabytes per second, download and upload speed.
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