IBM Wins Federal Contract

IBM Corp. beat two other bidders for a contract to deliver a supercomputer to the federal government that will be three times as powerful as the fastest in the world today, company officials said Monday.

The computer will harness 12,000 of IBM’s new Power5 microprocessors and will be used by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., to simulate the performance of nuclear weapons. Dubbed ASCI Purple, it will be capable of 100 trillion calculations per second when it comes on line in the second half of 2004.

A second IBM supercomputer, Blue Gene/L, will be used for broader scientific research under the same $290-million Department of Energy contract, which will be announced today during a supercomputing conference in Baltimore. Several national laboratories will apply Blue Gene to problems in genetics and weather mapping.

IBM won two earlier rounds of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative, delivering ASCI White in August 2001 and ASCI Blue Pacific in 1998. Intel Corp. and Silicon Graphics Inc. also have won contracts for ASCI supercomputers. The latest win came against Hewlett-Packard Co. and an unidentified contender, officials said.

Though ASCI Purple would fill two basketball courts, it just ties the processing power of a single human brain, IBM said. ASCI White had the power of a mouse brain.

ASCI Purple will be eight times as powerful as IBM’s previous ASCI machine, said IBM chief project architect Ravi Arimilli.

The leap was made possible through improvements in the speed of the individual processors, he said. The clusters of servers also are designed to move work around for peak performance.

The result will be the first system that can track the ripple effects of a change in the design of a nuclear weapon, Livermore spokesman David Schwoegler said.

“When we come up with an element in the weapon, say a change in plutonium, we can insert it into the equation and see if it is still viable,” Schwoegler said. One cycle of the test, simulating a fraction of a second, still will take eight weeks. On the Cray One supercomputer used in 1994, it would have taken 60,000 years.

The win comes at a good time for Big Blue. In a list of the 500 most powerful machines released this week, IBM didn’t make the top three for the first time in more than three years.

In the past, IBM’s work on supercomputers has trickled down and improved machines more affordable by businesses. This time, Arimilli said, companies will see the benefits even before the government does.

“With ASCI Blue and White, when you look deeply, they are designed for number crunching, not Web serving and functions like that,” he said. “ASCI Purple is designed to go after not just deep computing but Web serving and things affecting 99% of the server industry.” The same chips and system architecture will be sold in small IBM computers early in 2004, he said.