IBM ULTRASUPERCOMPUTER WILL TEST NUCLEAR DEVICES.Byline: Paul Recer Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. An ultrasupercomputer - 300 times faster than any existing machine - will be built by 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) to give the government a way to simulate nuclear explosions without actually blowing up bombs. Announcing the $94 million project Friday, Energy Secretary Hazel hazel, any plant of the genus Corylus of the family Betulaceae (birch family), shrubs or small trees with foliage similar to the related alders. They are often cultivated for ornament and for the edible nuts. O'Leary called it a ``dramatic leapfrog'' over current technology. The ultrasupercomputer is expected to be able to do 3 trillion operations a second and retain 2.5 trillion bytes of memory, making it by far the world's most powerful thinking machine. Current supercomputers have about 10 billion bytes. A byte is the smallest unit of computer memory. Such speed and depth of memory will enable scientists to design mathematical models
To further illustrate the power of the ultrasupercomputer - to be known as ``DOE Option Blue'' - Energy Department officials resorted to analogies from the Olympics, despite an embarrassing string of glitches with IBM systems in Atlanta. The department's Gill Wiegand said that if the best jump of a world-record pole vaulter was equal to the power of the current 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 , then Option Blue will equal the mark of a vaulter able to leap over a 600-story building. |
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