IBM to Supply Machines for Grid Computing Network

IBM will supply high-performance Unix-based servers and software for a grid-computing project studying areas such as hurricane storm surges and human genome sequences, the company said Friday.

The three-year agreement is with the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA), a U.S. consortium of organizations and universities linked into a grid computing system, SURAgrid.

SURAgrid’s distributed computing power is used for a wide variety of scientific projects in multiple disciplines, from nuclear physics to information technology to coastal research.

SURAgrid will use IBM’s System p575 servers, each of which use 16 Power5+ microprocessors running at 1.9GHz and 32GB of memory. The servers run AIX, IBM’s version of Unix. The additional equipment means SURAgrid will be able to double its capacity and perform 10 trillion calculations per second, which would take one person 8 million years to do with a calculator, IBM said.

The grid is linked together by middleware from the Globus Alliance, an open-source grid computing organization.

Three schools—Louisiana State University, Georgia State University and Texas A&M University—will be among the first to take on the equipment.

SURAgrid will be used to study the effects of rising water levels caused by storms, which cause flooding in low-lying coastal areas. The project is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

IBM declined to specify the value of the deal. SURAgrid was not immediately available for comment.

-Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service (London Bureau)

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