IBM TO LINK US GOVT LAB COMPUTERS IN POWERFUL GRID.(Reuters) International Business Machines Corp. said Friday it has a deal to link a U.S. government research laboratory's far-flung computers in a powerful grid, massively boosting their ability to study complex issues such as global climate change. Armonk, New York-based IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) said it will work with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, or NERSC for short, is a designated user facility operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Energy. , based in Berkeley, California Berkeley is a city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay in Northern California, in the United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington. , on developing software to connect the lab's supercomputers and data storage machines to other computers in four different locations. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center said its goal is to enable scientists to connect supercomputers and storage machines to off-site scientific instruments like telescopes, making it easier to do research or analyze data stored in diverse locations. In addition, scientists will be able to tap into computing computing - computer power at far-flung locations, said Horst Simon, a research director at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. The lab currently has a 5 teraflop (unit) teraflop - 10^12 flops. Intel beat Hitachi to the record of 1.06 teraflops, on 04 Dec 1996, unofficially in Beverton, Oregon, using 7264 Pentium Pro chips. supercomputer supercomputer, a state-of-the-art, extremely powerful computer capable of manipulating massive amounts of data in a relatively short time. Supercomputers are very expensive and are employed for specialized scientific and engineering applications that must handle very , or one that can run five trillion operations per second, located in Berkeley. "What the grid is about is in a sense to create a very easy-to-use infrastructure which makes a lot of things that scientists do today and have done for the last decade much, much more efficient...," Simon said. IBM has said the still-nascent field of "grid computing grid computing, the concurrent application of the processing and data storage resources of many computers in a network to a single problem. It also can be used for load balancing as well as high availability by employing multiple computers—typically personal " is one of its key computing strategies under new Chief Executive Sam Palmisano. It said it saw numerous commercial uses for the technology, which will one day allow corporations like financial institutions to tap into off-site computing power. That could ultimately increase computing power while decreasing the cost of computing, IBM said. Grid computing is based on a still-developing open source software called Globus, which has a free source of programming code. In February, IBM and other groups announced a standard for grid computing during a meeting on grid in Toronto. |
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