IBM gets supercomputer contract

By Jim Krane
Associated Press

NEW YORK — In a computing power struggle tinged with national pride, IBM Corp. says it hopes to regain the title for world's fastest supercomputer from Japan's NEC Corp. in 2004 when Big Blue delivers a machine that will model nuclear weapons for the U.S. government.

"There's a bit of nationalism involved," said Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee. "We like to think in the U.S. that we have the most powerful computers. Well, the Japanese have it now."

Japan's NEC jolted the computer world in April when its Earth Simulator, which knits together 5,000 processors to attain a theoretical speed of 40 trillion calculations per second, became the first machine built outside the United States to top the supercomputer speed list.

The Earth Simulator — based in Yokohama, Japan — not only took the lead, but did so by trouncing the then-fastest machine, IBM's ASCI White, by running almost five times as fast.

"It's an exciting time," said Dongarra, who leads the group of researchers tracking the world's 500 speediest computers, known as the Top 500 list. "We went through a period of doldrums. The Earth Simulator has revived interest in high-power computing."

At the SuperComputing 2002 conference in Baltimore today, U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is to announce a $290 million contract with IBM to build two new supercomputers, one of which, dubbed ASCI Purple, is expected to clock in at 100 teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second.

Like so many of America's fastest computers, ASCI Purple will be used to simulate the explosions and decay of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without resorting to test detonations.

Whether IBM's ASCI Purple becomes the first machine to knock NEC's Earth Simulator off the block remains to be seen.

Other companies are working toward the same goal, including Hewlett-Packard Co. (builder of the current No. 2 and 3 machines), Cray Inc. (which is designing a pair of alternate systems for the Department of Energy), and NEC itself, analysts said.

About 90 percent of the top 500 supercomputers are U.S.-made, according to the Top 500 list, compiled by researchers at the University of Mannheim in Germany, the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in Berkeley, Calif., and the University of Tennessee.

For Dave Turek, IBM's vice president of deep computing, nationalism is no concern.

"We're international," he said. "For us, every nation is an IBM nation."