IBM Wins Two Supercomputer Contracts Worth $325 Million

In a Department of Energy deal worth $325 million, IBM will build two massive supercomputers called Sierra and Summit that combine a new supercomputing approach from Big Blue with Nvidia processing accelerators and Mellanox high-speed networking.

The companies and US government agency announced the deal on Friday ahead of a twice-yearly supercomputing conference that begins Monday. The show focuses on the high-end systems -- sometimes as large as a basketball court -- that are used to calculate car aerodynamics, detect structural weaknesses in airplane designs and predict the performance of new drugs.

The funds will pay for two machines, one for civilian research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and one for nuclear weapons simulation at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. They'll each clock in with a peak performance surpassing 100 petaflops -- that's a quadrillion calculations per second as measured in the Top500 list that ranks the world's fastest machines. Trying to do that with modern laptops would take something like 3 million of them, Nvidia estimates.

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