IBM, the world's largest computer manufacturer, recently announced plans to build a new supercomputer that will be the world's fastest.
In a partnership with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of California, IBM intends to construct a computer that will be 15-times faster than the current fastest computer in the world.
Dubbed Blue Gene/L, the machine will be 15 percent more energy efficient and take up 50-times less space per computation.
"This technology opens the door to a number of applications of great interest to civilian industry and business, like biology and other life sciences," says David Nowak, who leads the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program at the Lawrence Livermore Labs.
"Examples of those applications include the modeling of the aging and properties of materials, and the modeling of turbulence," Nowak said.
At an expected top speed of 200 trillion "floating point" operations per second (teraflops), Blue Gene/L will be more powerful than the current 500 fastest computers in the world combined.
While current supercomputers have to take the time-intensive step of accessing the main memory during computation, IBM says the new machine will be "populated with data-chip cells optimized for data access."
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