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IBM's next supercomputer
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August 2, 2000: 8:05 p.m. ET
Defense Department will use the system for ocean mapping, research
By Staff Writer Richard Richtmyer
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - IBM on Thursday is expected to announce that it will supply the U.S. Department of Defense with the latest addition to its computing arsenal.
The new supercomputer, an IBM RS/6000 SP, will be capable of processing two trillion calculations per second, making it the fourth largest in the world and the most powerful at the Defense Department, IBM said.
Nicknamed "Blue Wave," the system's primary function will be to assemble detailed models of ocean waves, currents and temperatures. Those models will enable scientists to better predict the behavior of the world's oceans, helping to improve the safety of naval operations and commercial shipping and augmenting search and rescue capabilities.
The new computer, which carries a price tag of $17 million, also will be used for Defense Department research projects ranging from designing stronger aircraft to simulating battlefield environments.
 The contract with the Defense Department marks the latest in a raft of big supercomputer deals Big Blue has inked in recent months, most of which have been for RS/6000 SP systems.
In May, the Finnish Academic Supercomputing Center in Helsinki paid $4.5 million for an RS/6000 SP, which it plans to use for research in materials physics, computational fluid dynamics and quantum chemistry.
In June, IBM sold an RS/6000 SP to the U.S. Energy Department for $110 million. That system, called "ASCI White" and capable of processing 12.3 trillion calculations per second, currently is the world's most powerful. It's being used primarily to test the safety and effectiveness of the nation's aging nuclear weapons stockpile.
"We are very committed to the supercomputing business at large, as evidenced by the fact that today we have something in the order of 145 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world," said David Turek, IBM's vice president of deep computing.
"While that's not a majority, it certainly is a substantially greater amount than any of the other players on that list," Turek added.
 IBM is the world's leading supplier of supercomputing systems, garnering roughly 30 percent of the global market share in 1999, according to technology research firm International Data Corp.
The company also holds a prominent position on the TOP500 List of Supercomputing Sites, a ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers.
Historically, supercomputers have been limited in large part to government and academic settings. But that's been changing in recent years, according to Turek. He said supercomputing systems are increasingly being deployed in mainstream corporate enterprises, particularly among financial services companies.
At Charles Schwab, for example, an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer handles the Web serving and some of the back-end processing for the brokerage's online trading and e-commerce services, Turek said.
Given its historical role in developing supercomputing systems for government and academic applications, Turek said IBM is in a good position to apply the technology it has developed for those markets in the fast-growing commercial sector.
"By participating at the cutting edge, we teach ourselves things at a much quicker pace. And those benefits accrue to our commercial customers, who might be close to, but are somewhat removed from the cutting edge," he said.
IBM's RS/6000 SP is a highly 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.
Each node uses Power3-II processors, which are the direct successors to the Power2 chips inside "Deep Blue," the computer that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
The Blue Wave system will be made up of 334 nodes and harness the computing power of 1,336 Power3-II processors, 1.336 terabytes of memory and 17 terabytes of disk-storage space. 
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