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IBM builds a bigger box
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June 21, 2001: 5:00 a.m. ET
'Seaborg' supercomputer to be used in energy research, takes Intel No. 2 spot
By Staff Writer Richard Richtmyer
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Adding another feather to its supercomputer cap, IBM will announce Thursday that it has delivered the world's second most-powerful computer, giving it the top two spots in an independent ranking of high-performance systems.
Nicknamed "Seaborg" – in honor of Glenn Theodore Seaborg, the Nobel Laureate chemist who discovered 10 atomic elements, including plutonium – the new system is now in place at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in California.
It currently is in the configuration stage. When fully operational, it will be used for a wide range of sophisticated research projects, such as simulating gasoline combustion and exploring potential new materials as energy sources.
"The range of research goes from basic chemistry and physics and materials science to environmental research," said John Hules, a NERSC spokesman. The system will be put to work on fusion-energy and nuclear-physics problems as well, Hules said.
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The IBM-built 'Seaborg' supercomputer, seen here, is the second-fastest computer system in the world. | |
At a cost of roughly $33 million, Seaborg is second only to the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative - White, or "ASCI White," system that IBM built for the U.S. Energy Department.
With the new system in place, IBM now claims the two top spots on the latest TOP500 List of Supercomputing Sites, an independent ranking of the world's fastest supercomputers that is compiled twice a year by the University of Mannheim and the University of Tennessee.
The Seaborg system supplants Intel's "ASCI Red" as No. 2 on the list.
Like ASCI White, which had a price tag of $110 million, the Seaborg system is made up of building blocks, called nodes, each of which has one or more microprocessors and its own memory and disk storage.
Seaborg is made up of 158 nodes, each with 16 IBM Power3-II processors operating at 375 megahertz and 12 gigabytes of memory. The system has a total of 31 terabytes of storage space.
All that hardware translates into a maximum operating speed of 3.8 teraflops, which means it can perform 3.8 trillion operations per second. That's about a third as fast as ASCI White, which tops out at 12.3 teraflops.
The Seaborg system is one of many large supercomputer systems IBM either has contracted for or deployed over the past year, in both the scientific research as well as the commercial sectors.
Executives at IBM cited the headway they have been making in the high-performance computing market as evidence that Big Blue's efforts to move its most advanced technology out of the laboratory and into real-world systems are paying off.
"IBM has extended its supercomputing leadership by designing systems that are equally at home running huge Web sites as they are solving complex scientific problems," said Surjit Chana, vice president of IBM's high-performance computing division.
"IBM will continue to deliver the kind of supercomputing technology that will help solve the most challenging problems of business, engineering and science," Chana added.
Over the past three years, more than half of IBM's sales of new supercomputers have been to customers that use them as commercial Web-hosting servers, Chana said.
IBM executives also held up the latest TOP500 List, set to be officially unveiled at a supercomputing trade show in Germany Thursday, as evidence that their efforts in the high-performance market have not been in vain.
At last count, IBM had 201 of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers, an increase of 40 percent from a year earlier. Additionally, IBM-built systems are now in six of the top 10 spots on the list, where previously there were five. 
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