IBM supercomputer to model world's oceans
Date: 21-Jun-02
Country: USA
IBM said that the Blue Ocean computer would cost the department's Naval Oceanographic Office in the range of $15 million and also be used for infectious disease research.
At more than six teraflops, or six trillion calculations per second, the machine is roughly half as powerful as ASCI White, until recently the biggest supercomputer, which cost $110 million a couple of years ago.
The earth simulator made by NEC Corp., the new No. 1 on the list of the top 500 computers updated yesterday, can make just under 41 trillion calculations per second at peak.
Blue Ocean, made up of 37 IBM p690 servers with 1,184 POWER4 processors, would fit in at No. 3 on the list, if it had been announced in time to make the update.
IBM also said it had sold a supercomputer that could make 4 trillion calculations per second and was divided into two clusters located 300 km (190 miles) apart to the High Performance Computing Center for North Germany.