From: Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Date: Fri Feb 13 1998 - 14:01:34 MST
s
SOMERS, N.Y., (Feb 13) - International Business Machines Corp. said
Friday it signed an $85 million contract to build the world's
fastest supercomputer.
The computer giant said it won the contract from the U.S.
Department of Energy and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
located in Livermore, Calif.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Federico Pena announced the contract
Thursday in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.
The IBM RS/6000 SP, the technology behind Deep Blue's successful
challenge of chess grand master Garry Kasparov, will be capable of
10 trillion calculations per second upon its installation at
Livermore in the year 2000.
The computer, when complete, will be capable of calculating in a
single second what would take 10 million years using a hand-held
calculator.
The contract, announced under the DOE's Accelerated Strategic
Computing Initiative (ASCI), is the third IBM award in a program
designed to build systems capable of tera-scale (trillion
calculations-per-second) computing,
HREF="http://www.rs6000.ibm.com/resource/pressreleases/1998/Feb/d
oe.html"> IBM said.
These systems will enable the DOE to conduct complex modeling and
simulation to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's
nuclear stockpile in the absence of nuclear testing.
This new technology will also offer the DOE an eight-fold increase
in simulation detail compared to what is available today.
''Banks, retailers, insurers, manufacturers, health care, and
communications providers are among the industries that stand to
benefit from technological advances resulting from ASCI,'' the
company said in a statement.
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