Today Forbes reported that IBM will be announcing a commercially available supercomputer boasting 3,072 cores and up to 524, 288 nodes with the ability to communicate in 200 nanoseconds or less.
Such an offering has already appealed to at least one Wall Street company with more likely to line up in advance of the formal announcement this summer, according to Robert Brinkman who leads the banking and financial markets division at IBM.
Brinkman told Forbes about the high speed data fabric with a speed of 200 nanseconds between cores. He said that “Blue Waters will have a peak memory bandwidth of nearly 5 petabytes/second, more than 1 petabyte memory, 18 petabytes of disk storage and 500 petabytes of archival storage.”
IBM has been working with the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois on the scientific variety of the PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-Use, Reliable Computing System) which is Blue Waters.