IBM Donates Blue Gene Time to US DOE

IBM on Wednesday announced that it would develop a plan with the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory to allow researchers around the world to request time on its Blue Gene system, the second fastest computer in existence. Blue Gene has a capacity of 91 teraflops, or 91 trillion calculations each second.

The computing power would augment Argonne's pre-existing capacity for the DOE's INCITE program. Some of the accomplishments of the initiative include detailed three-dimensional combustion simulations of flames that have assisted in pollution research, and studies on how newly formed stars and black holes grow among others.

Blue Gene could be used by the researchers for large projects in fields such as aerospace, automotive engineering, biotechnology, chemistry, energy or physics, IBM said.

"IBM invested in BGW, the fastest privately owned supercomputer in the world, to explore a range of fields including life sciences, hydrodynamics, materials sciences, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics and fluid dynamics - as well as business applications," Dave Turek, vice president Deep Computing for IBM, said.

"Due to the overwhelming demand of requests for this platform, we are pleased to be participating in the INCITE program with Argonne and the DOE, and look forward to the results of research conducted on Blue Gene."

INCITE stands for Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, and is open to all researchers and organizations. All of INCITE's projects are large; the group looks for ones that require a great deal of computing power to accomplish.

Projects are then given one to three years on INCITE's system to complete their work, however the organization expects to have several that require more time to complete.

The group will also provide computing power to industry in order to solve several problems, including full vehicle design, oil and gas recovery, auto crash safety, textile manufacture, and ways to improve crude oil yields.