08-06-2007, 06:58 PM
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 I.B.M. Near Supercomputer Contract
Quote: I.B.M. Near Supercomputer Contract
New York Times (08/06/07) Markoff, John
Documents accidentally posted for a short time on a federal government Web site show that the National Science Foundation plans to award a contract to build the world's faster supercomputer to I.B.M. The supercomputer is expected to be built at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and will cost $200 million to build and may cost more than $400 million during its five-year lifetime. The supercomputer will be the first machine capable of handling one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second, also known as a petaflop. Unlike most of the nation's academic research supercomputers, which serve a large community of users, the petaflop supercomputer will be reserved for handling a limited number of Grand Challenge science projects, like simulating the impact of global warming. The computer represents a significant shift in the balance of computing power between military and scientific computer centers. For most of the last two decades, the fastest computers in the United States were located at either the national laboratories at Los Alamos, N.M., or Livermore, Calif., and were primarily used for tasks related to the design and preservation of nuclear weapons and other classified applications. The documents have caused quite a bit of controversy, as several government supercomputing scientists say they are concerned that the decision might raise questions about impartiality and political influence. A second award listed in the documents shows that the NSF is also planning to install a Cray supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, which essentially would supply the Department of Energy with another supercomputer, because although the award was given to the university, the operation would be run by the Department of Energy. The I.B.M. supercomputer may not be the world's faster computer for long, however, as Japanese researchers are designing a machine that they believe will reach a computing threshold of 10 petaflops in 2011.
| Source: ACM TechNews
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