IBM has collaborated with French agency GENCI to develop scientific applications which could take supercomputing to exascale- a billion calculations per second.
The partners expect the collaboration to achieve performance of over 100 petaflops, representing a step forward on the path to exascale computing.
The current fastest processing is around 10 to 33 petaflops, or about 10 to 33 million calculations per second.
Under the collaboration, which is expected to last about 18 months, the partners will use computing technology from OpenPOWER ecosystem.
OpenPOWER ecosystem includes a variety of computing solutions that use IBM’s licensable and open POWER processor technology.
GENCI will focus on the impact and needs of POWER’s open architecture on scientific apps to have better knowledge on the application requirements as the computing industry advances towards exascale computing.
The collaboration will take advantage of OpenPOWER-based innovations like the connection of Nvidia GPU accelerators to POWER processors via the high-speed Nvidia NVLink interconnect.
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It will also focus on how Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand switches can exploit IBM’s Coherent Application Processor Interface to enhance solution performance.
IBM scientists along with experts from GENCI and French research organisations intend to take forward the evolution of programming models.
IBM France CTO Michel Teyssedre said: "The work we are doing with GENCI — bringing together some of the best minds in science and information technology – is a collaborative effort on a grand scale involving not just GENCI and IBM, but thousands of developers contributing to the rapidly expanding OpenPOWER ecosystem worldwide.
"We fully expect our collaborative efforts will produce innovations capable of moving the supercomputing industry that much closer to exascale."
Separately, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) has signed a five-year AU$450m agreement with IBM to improve its branch, digital, and mobile capabilities to support its regional expansion.
ANZ will have access to IBM’s software portfolio, cloud development capabilities, and core systems infrastructure.
Both the firms will co-invest in an Innovation Lab, which will be powered by IBM’s cloud development platform-as-as-service, Bluemix.
