IBM is building a supercomputer !

The University of Toronto and IBM Corp joined forces and the outcome might amaze the whole world : a powerful supercomputer, a giant machine that will require a personal building for storage and will be capable of performing 360 trillion calculations per second. The system will be among the top 20 fastest supercomputers in the world and the largest outside the United States and it will be able to store data equivalent to that held by one million regular DVDs. You might wonder how much this “baby” will cost : The entire budget of the project, which includes construction and operating costs, is just under C$50 million ($47 million) over five years so buying one is kinda out of the question, for most of us anyway.

“Its power is roughly equivalent to 30,000 to 40,000 home computers linked together; the kind of interconnect between parts of the system will allow the equivalent of two full-length feature DVD movies to be moved around in the space of a second.”( Chris Pratt, strategic initiatives executive at IBM Canada)

Its purpose? It will be a big boost to scientists at the University of Toronto and its associated research hospitals, as it will help tackle projects in an array of areas from aerospace and astrophysics to climate change prediction and medical imaging. Also the system will be used to explore the modern scientific mystery of why matter has mass and what constitutes the mass of the universe.

The data center will be built just north of Toronto and the installation will begin in the autumn hoping that the supercomputer will be fully operational by next summer.

Source: Reuters

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