The American company IBM and the French agency GENCI have announced a collaboration aimed at speeding up the path to exascale computing.
GENCI is an organization created in 2007 by the French government, with the purpose to establish France among the leading countries on the international stage of next-gen computing technologies.
IBM and France's GENCI high-performance computing agency will unite their forces to work on supercomputing exascale technology. Exascale, according to computer scientists represents a computing system's ability to perform at least 1 billion calculations per second, which in terms of computing technology is called 1 exaflop.
The collaboration between the two organizations is planned to run for at least one year and a half. The joint venture will focus on developing complex scientific applications for the new systems that are expected to achieve more than 100 petaflops. According to IBM sources, this would be an important step toward the goal to achieve exascale computing technology.
The supercomputing experts from IBM will work closely with GENCI high-performance computing technologies provided by the rapidly expanding OpenPOWER ecosystem.
OpenPOWER is supported by thousands of developers worldwide and more than 140 foundation members of the project. The ecosystem includes diverse computing solutions that use IBM's open POWER processor technology.
The fastest supercomputers in the world perform currently between 10 and 33 million billion calculations per second or in other words, between 10 and 33 petaflops. According to IBM, this is roughly 1 to 3 percent of the aimed speed of the future exascale technology.
The French agency GENCI will study the impact of the OpenPOWER architecture on scientific applications as well as the requirements of the new technology in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the computing industry advances toward the goal of exascale computing. According to GENCI sources, a particular emphasis will be placed on accelerator technologies.
According to a statement made by Michel Teyssedre, CTO of IBM France, the project of the two organizations is a collaborative effort that is not only involving IBM and GENCI but thousands of developers as well, a project that is bringing together some of the best minds in science and information technology.
