IBM BladeCenter Fuels Europe's Supercomputer

IBM (www.ibm.com) and the Spanish Minister of Education & Science, María Jesús San Segundo, unveiled today the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, breaking previously held records according to the LINPACK benchmark.

"The expected ranking of MareNostrum among the top five supercomputers in the world is a true testament to the high-performance power, scalability and agility of IBM's 64-bit Power Architecture running Linux on the JS20 systems," said Brian Connors, vice president for Linux on POWER at IBM.

Named "MareNostrum," the system was built with highly scalable and flexible IBM eServer(TM) BladeCenter JS20 blade servers and is based on the Linux operating system and IBM's POWER(TM) microprocessors -- marking the first time that blade server technology has been used to attain top-five status among the world's most powerful supercomputers.

The supercomputer was built as a result of an agreement between IBM and the Spanish Government and will be available for a wide range of high-level scientific research and for applications in several industrial sectors.

Currently, IBM has installed 3,564 POWER processors out of the 4,564 that the computer system is expected to have upon total completion. Once the project is fully completed, the supercomputer will employ a cluster of 2,282 eServer BladeCenter JS20 servers and is expected to reach as much as 40 Teraflops of peak performance.

The MareNostrum system will be used by several scientific disciplines within the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science to help solve some of today's most critical scientific questions.

The supercomputer is a tool for the Spanish scientific community, making possible the development of projects that, until now, could only be conducted at international centers.