Argonne eyeing supercomputer title

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

LEMONT — Sometime next year, Argonne National Laboratory will be home to the world’s baddest and fastest supercomputer.

Or perhaps not.

IBM said Tuesday a new-generation Blue Gene supercomputer is slated to be installed next year at the U.S. Energy Department laboratory near Lemont.

Argonne and another federal lab, Lawrence Livermore in California, worked with IBM to develop the new generation of supercomputers, which are not only faster but much more energy efficient than the current Blue Gene used by the labs.

Argonne’s current computer, Intrepid, can perform more than 500 trillion calculations a second.

But it’s a slowpoke compared with the supercomputer coming next year, which Argonne has named for the star Mira.

IBM says Mira will have the power to run programs at 10 quadrillion calculations a second. To put that in perspective, if every man, woman and child in the United States performed one calculation each second, it would take them almost a year to do as many calculations as Mira will do in one second, according to IBM.

Argonne could hold the title to having the world’s fastest supercomputer, but Livermore also is getting a new Blue Gene sometime next year, and it will have double the computing power that Mira will have.

Who holds the title — and for how long — depends on which computer comes online first. It’s unclear exactly when the new Argonne and Livermore computers will be operational.

There also will be competition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which next year will fire up Blue Waters, a supercomputer on par with Mira, according to IBM.

“Once you get the title, it’s yours to lose quickly,” said Eleanor Taylor, an Argonne spokeswoman.

The power of today’s supercomputers is measured in something called a petaflop — 1 quadrillion mathematical computations per second.

Another Energy Department lab in Tennessee had, until last year, held the world’s record, with a supercomputer built by Cray hitting 1.6 petaflops. Then a supercomputer in China stole the crown, topping out at about 2.5 petaflops.

Argonne’s Mira will be a 10-petaflop speedster, while Livermore’s new computer, called Sequoia, will have a computing speed of 20 petaflops, according to IBM.

The faster that supercomputers get, the more energy it takes to cool them down. Most of the energy sucked up by these new ones is used to keep them from overheating, Argonne says.

A prototype of the computers that Argonne and Livermore are getting was ranked No. 1 as the world’s most energy efficient, and tubes running through Mira will carry chilled water to keep her temperature in check.

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