More IBM Supercomputers: Europe, You're Next

By now you probably know all the details of IBM's Sequoia and Dawn, trumpeted last week as a joint venture with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration to be the most powerful supercomputer and initial delivery system in the world .

Well, Europe isn't getting a Sequoia and Dawn package of its own yet, but it's not going to lose out on supercomputer excitement, either.

IBM on Monday said that the German research center Forschungszentrum Juelich had selected Big Blue to build what's being called the first supercomputer in Europe capable of reaching one petaflop per second (or, one thousand trillion operations per second).

IBM is partnering with German Gauss Centre for Supercomputing and according to a press release plans to install the new IBM Blue Gene/p system in the first half of 2009. The German Ministry of Research and Ministry of Research of Northrhine-Westfalia will be financing the project through their ongoing support of the Gauss Centre.

The wow factor of this system is that it will be the first Blue Gene system to use room temperature water cooling technology to cool the servers. According to IBM, the water cooling system relieves air of heat as it moves from rack to rack. The vendor cites air conditioning needs as being reduced by 91 percent when the water-based cooling system is working properly.

"Forschungszentrum Jeulich and IBM complement each other ideally with a focus in developing compact systems with industry leading performance and energy efficiency," said Martin Jetter, general manager of IBM Germany, in a statement. "This new petaflop Blue Gene system will ensure that Germany remains relevant for leading research and engineering."

The Juelich's 1 petaflop top performance is no match for Sequoia's smokin' 20 petaflop-per-second system, but isn't anything to sniff at, either.

IBM provided members of the press a brief rundown of the Juelich Blue Gene System specifics. The systems haven't been named. IBM said it would do so at a naming ceremony later this year.

-- Peak performance: 1 petaflop

-- Processor type: 32-bit PowerPC 450 core 850MHz

-- Compute node: 4-way SMP processor

-- Memory: 144 terabytes

-- Racks: 72

-- Network latency: 160 nanoseconds

-- Network bandwidth: 5.1 GBps

-- Energy consumption: 2200 kw

In a word: Prost!