Jun 16 2005
IBM has launched the world's most powerful privately owned supercomputer, the Watson Blue Gene system, nicknamed BGW, installed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
With a processing speed of 91.29 teraflops, the system is expected to be one of the top three supercomputers in the world. BGW comprises 20 refrigerator-sized racks, less than half the size of conventional systems of comparable power, and has three times the performance.
IBM plans to use the system in a variety of fields including life sciences, hydrodynamics, materials sciences, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics and fluid dynamics and business applications.
"IBM researchers will use BGW to accelerate discovery in a variety of disciplines," said Tilak Agerwala, vice president, Systems, IBM Research. "Researchers, scientists, engineers and inventors can now ask more questions, test more theories, try more designs, and simulate more conditions than has been possible before."
The company also intends to provide access to BGW computing resources to academic and industrial researchers as part of the Department of Energy's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program.
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