IBM will finish a new supercomputer next year, dubbed Mira, that will reach many times the performance of the currently fastest supercomputer. IBM has been given the assignment of the US Department of Energy to build a supercomputer that can reach performance of 10 PetaFLOPS to be used in heavy calculations.
USA’s Department of Energy will build the new supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory where it is expected to use the power of Mira to, e.g., deseign superefficient car batteries, but also try to understand the global climat changes and investigate the development of the universe.
Mira builds on IBM’s next generation Blue Gene/Q architecture that will get a broad field of work and at the same time be a step in the preparation for Exascale computers that will be capable of 1,000 quadrillion calculations per second, where Mira can “only” do 10 quadrillion calculations per second. The world’s fastest supercomputer today, Tianhe 1A, can do about 2.57 quadrillion calculations per second.
For example, scientists will have to scale their current computer codes to more than 750,000 individual computing cores, providing them preliminary experience on how scalability might be achieved on an exascale-class system with 100s of millions of cores.
IBM Blue Gene/Q use 16-core IBM PowerPC A2 processors with four-way multithreading technology for up to 64 simultaneous threads. With 750,000 processor cores and 1GB DDR3 memory per CPU Mira will be cooled by a specially designed water cooling system.
Mira will go online next year and raise the bar for supercomputers in 2012.
