IBM has just unveiled its latest supercomputing project, which will attempt to blow past the competition to become the world's most powerful number-cruncher.
Blue Gene/Q - also known as Mira - is the latest in a long line of Blue Gene systems and will be based at the US government's Argonne Leadership Computing Facility just outside of Chicago. There it'll replace the older Blue Gene/P system where it'll work on a number of projects from studying energy efficiency in transportation to designing new engines.
When it's fully up and running - which should be sometime in 2012 - Mira will be able to perform 10 quadrillion calculation per second (petaflops), which is 20 times more than its predecessor. It'll also make it about four times faster than China's Tianhe-1A, which used GPUs to climb to the top of the TOP500.
To give some frame of reference, Mira can do in one second what it would take every man, woman and child in the US almost a year to do if they worked at a rate of one calculation per second.
The system will be made up of thousands of PowerPC CPUs which, combined, will have a total of more than 750,000 cores. On top of that, IBM claims it'll be one of the planet's most power-efficient supercomputers thanks to a new chip-design and a highly efficient water-cooling system.
After Mira, another Blue Gene/Q system will be installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab that should be able to hit the 20 petaflop mark next year. Of course, IBM's eyes are firmly focused on exascale computing, and Mira is seen as an important stepping stone to the next generation of super-powerful computers.
