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IBM hits power milestone
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June 28, 2000: 9:09 p.m. ET
IBM delivers world's most powerful computer to Energy Department
By Staff Writer John Chartier
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - IBM will announce Thursday it has built the world's most powerful computer - powerful enough to process an Internet transaction for every person on Earth in less than a minute.
IBM built the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative - White, or ASCI White supercomputer for the U.S. Energy Department, so it can accurately test the safety and effectiveness of the nation's aging nuclear weapons stockpile, the company said.
The government, which paid $110 million for the system, sought development of such a computer in the early 1990s in anticipation of a ban on underground nuclear testing, which President Clinton imposed this year. Some of the warheads are 40 years old.
Previous versions in the ASCI program have included the red series by Intel, and the blue series by SGI/Cray and IBM. Although each was the most powerful of its time, the new White version for the first time allows scientists to factor in a host of variables when running a simulation.
The ASCI White, which weighs 106 tons and uses enough electricity to power a small town, is being shipped to the U.S. Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore Labs in California in 28 tractor-trailer trucks. The computer is powerful enough to process an Internet commerce transaction for every person on Earth in less than one minute.
That's three times more powerful than the previous champ, IBM's ASCI Blue Pacific, and 1,000 times more powerful than "Deep Blue," the computer which defeated world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.
The complexity of the new system will boost IBM's marketing efforts more than the computer will impact the earnings and revenue for the Somers, N.Y. based company which is already the leading supplier of supercomputing systems with 30 percent of the global market share in 1999, said Debra Goldfarb, an analyst with technology research firm International Data Corp.
The real benefit, Goldfarb said, is the benefit to the computing industry as the technology trickles down.
"One of the premises of ASCI is there's a direct trickle down effect in terms of technology, interconnect and software technology that has moved very rapidly," Goldfarb said. "There's been a direct trickle down from a software standpoint."
The computer's speed is measured in teraflops, which are the number of operations it can perform each second. ASCI white runs at 12.3 teraflops, or 12.3 trillion operations per second. The previous ASCI computer, which went into use last year, measured 3.87 teraflops.
The government's goal is to get a 100-teraflop computer built by 2003-2004.
Although extremely complex, the computer is essentially 8,000 smaller processors connected by 8,192 copper microprocessors and 2,000 miles of copper wiring.
It is a scalable system, which means it is made up of building blocks called nodes, each of which has one or more microprocessors and its own memory and disk storage.
Smaller versions of this computer are already used in weather forecasting and tracking credit card fraud, said David Turek, IBM's vice president for deep computing. A smaller version of the ASCI computer also helped scientists map the human genome, said David Nowak, deputy associate director of Livermore Labs.
 "We've always used simulations (to test nuclear warheads), but they were very small and we had to assume everything was symmetric," Nowak said. "We've never had this kind of computing power before."
Shares of IBM (IBM: Research, Estimates) closed up 19/32 at 110-11/32 Wednesday. 
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