IBM and Nvidia unite

IBM and Nvidia unite to build more powerful computer in the world

A reputed partnership promises to surprise the world of supercomputers. IBM and Nvidia announced that they will come together to build a new supercomputer that should be the fastest in the world. This machine is expected to reach 150 petaflops of processing power, but the detail that draws more attention in the proposal is the incredible energy efficiency of the computer. The project should be completed in 2017.

The project is to build two computers, Summit and the Sierra, which will reach 150 petaflops performance and consume between 11.4 and 13.1 megawatts (1 megawatt / hour is enough to power an average of 540 households). To give you an idea as it is efficient, the fastest supercomputer in the world today, the Chinese Tianhe2, uses 17 megawatts to achieve peak performance in their 34 petaflops.

This means that both Summit and Sierra, can be five times more efficient than Tianhe2. The 150 such peak petaflops computers are to hand in a 11,000 megaflops per watt performance.

According to IBM, the power consumption more efficiently is possible thanks to the machine architecture, developed so that she can move large amounts of data faster. According to the disclosure of material, in total, the computers will be able to move 17 petabytes of data per second.

IBM and Nvidia gained a credit line of US Department of Energy (equivalent to our ministry of mines and energy) to develop the two machines. Both will have Power8 processors, IBM, and new GPUs Volta, Nvidia, which were even released.

In the case of Return, it is known that the great innovation is the use of chip RAM mounted on the GPU using a novel technology that allows the whole graphic processor and RAM, reaches speeds of 1 TB / second data transfer. Both computers will be at the service of scientific research and simulation scenarios for which a massive computational power (such as weather prediction models and disasters)