IBM И Cray создадут суперкомпьютер для агентства DARPA
Существующий сегодня суперкомпьютер IBM BlueGene способен обрабатывать информацию со скоростью в 360 терафлопсов, то есть он способен совершать 360 триллионов операций с плавающей запятой в секунду.
Стоимость контрактов с Cray и IBM составляет 250 и 244 миллионов долларов, соответственно, сообщает Infoworld. Прототипы суперкомпьютера обе компании должны будут подготовить к 2010 году.
Создание суперкомпьютера запланировано в рамках программы HPCS, стартовавшей в 2002 году. Она нацелена на разработку высокопроизводительных вычислительных систем для использования в интересах национальной безопасности США, а также в науке и промышленности.
Sun Microsystems, которая тоже участвовала в этом тендере, в финальном раунде сошла с дистанции. Разработанные ей для этого проекта технологии она собирается использовать в линейке собственных продуктов.
On Tuesday the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded the two companies four-year contracts to design a supercomputer that is 100 times more powerful than today's most powerful systems, yet is simpler to program, administer and use.
Cray's contract is valued at 0 million and IBM's is worth 4 million. Each company is expected to have a prototype supercomputer ready by 2010.
The contracts were awarded as part of DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program, which is targeted at the national security community, science and industrial sectors.
Launched in 2002, its goal is to develop a system capable of performing calculations at the rate of two to four petaflop per second. A petaflop is one quadrillion (one thousand trillion) calculations per second. "Flop" stands for floating-point operations.
The fastest supercomputer in operation today, an IBM BlueGene system, operates at 360 teraflops, or 360 trillion calculations per second.
Sun Microsystems, which had been funded in earlier rounds of the contract, lost out on the latest round.
However the company still plans to integrate the technology it had been developing into its product lines, a Sun spokeswoman said.
Besides developing prototypes of the supercomputers, IBM and Cray are also tasked with building programming tools that speed the time it takes to write applications tenfold compared with what was possible when the HPCS program began.
DARPA says the ultimate goal of the project is to create a new generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems that can be sold to national security and high-end industrial users. Federal agencies likely to use the supercomputers will include the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Agency.
Источники:http://hard.compulenta.ru, http://www.infoworld.com