IBM withdraws from mega supercomputer project

IBM has stopped participating in the construction of a supercomputer for an American university for financial reasons. The Blue Waters supercomputer is due for delivery in 2012, but it is unclear whether that will be achieved.

Construction of the Blue Waters supercomputer was announced back in 2007. The computer should be housed in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. The project is largely funded by the National Science Foundation and is estimated to cost around $308 million. The NSF has provided $208 million, with the university guaranteeing the remaining $100 million.

IBM has received approximately $30 million in government funding and will repay that money. Reason for IBM to take over the project to strike would be an increase in costs for both design and future technical support.

The IBM servers already installed in the supercomputer center will be returned to IBM. The National Petascale Computing Facility at the University of Illinois must look for another hardware partner to complete the Blue Waters project. The NSF has to vote on the further details of the project in mid-September, which puts the university under time pressure. A team of about one hundred and twenty people is involved in the construction of the supercomputer.

The Blue Waters supercomputer should become a so-called petascale supercomputer. The water-cooled computer should reach continuous speeds of about 1 petaflops. This would make the computer slower than the current fastest supercomputer, the Japanese K Computer. It reaches peak speeds of up to 8 petaflops, but the continuous speed is lower.