Supercomputing Power Reaches All-Time High

Press Release
 

REPORT: USE OF IBM SUPERCOMPUTING POWER REACHES ALL TIME HIGH 

IBM Introduces Blue Gene Prototype; Inches Closer To Supercomputing's Holy
Grail of 1 Quadrillion Operations per Second

ARMONK, NY, November 16, 2003 ... An independent study released today named
IBM as the world's leading provider of supercomputing power with a record
total of 188 teraflops of power (trillions of calculations per second).
According to analysis from the TOP500 List of Supercomputers, IBM with 35.5
percent share dominates the global supercomputing market with 56 percent
more processing power than its closest rival, runner up HP with 22.7
percent. 

IBM supercomputers now account for 55 percent of the Top 100 of the most
powerful supercomputers on the list, versus 9 percent for HP. IBM's POWER
chip technology drives more of the top 100 most powerful supercomputers in
world than any other processor architecture. 

Today's announcement follows IBM's introduction on Friday of a prototype of
its Blue Gene/L supercomputer - a computer roughly the size of a 30-inch
television - that is ranked on the TOP500 List as the 73rd most powerful
supercomputer in the world. The Blue Gene/L prototype machine represents a
radical new design for supercomputing. At 1/20th the physical size of
existing machines of comparable power, Blue Gene/L enables dramatic
reductions in power consumption, cost and space requirements for businesses
requiring immense computing power. 

The full Blue Gene/L machine, which is being built for the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California, will be 128 times larger,
occupying 64 full racks. When completed in 2005, IBM expects Blue Gene/L to
lead the Top500 supercomputer list by a wide margin. Compared with today's
fastest supercomputers, it will be six times faster, consume 1/15th the
power per computation and be 10 times more compact than today's fastest
supercomputers 

"Leveraging our strengths in technology innovation, research, sophisticated
software and deep industry knowledge, IBM continues to build the world's
most powerful supercomputers," said Dave Turek, Vice President, IBM Deep
Computing. "IBM supercomputers are helping customers solve some of the most
complex problems in areas as diverse as global climate simulations, high
energy physics research, human genomics, drug development, motion picture
animation, fraud detection, financial risk analysis, computer aided
engineering, cosmology and aeronautics." 

Other key indicators of IBM supercomputing leadership: 

IBM has 159 supercomputer systems installed. 

	IBM has the most Linux clusters on the TOP500 List with 42% of all
Linux clusters 

	13 IBM eServer BladeCenter systems made the list for the first time,
an impressive debut for a system that has been available for less than one
year. 

	IBM leads in the number of processors with 109,625. 

	69 IBM supercomputers -- each with greater than 1 teraflop HPC
performance -- represent 53% of all systems over 1 teraflop on the TOP500. 

The "TOP500 List Supercomputing Sites" is compiled and published by
supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, Erich
Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim (Germany). The entire list can
be viewed at http://www.top500.org 

About IBM 

IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of
leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across
IBM and key Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services,
solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take
full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information about IBM,
visit www.ibm.com. 

Photos of Blue Gene/L available at
http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/bios.nsf/pages/bluegene2003.html