Navy awash in new IBM supercomputers

The Defense Department has agreed to buy a 2,944-processor IBM supercomputer for naval simulations, Big Blue plans to announce Tuesday.

The system, called Kraken, will have an expected performance of about 20 trillion calculations per second, or 20 teraflops. It's one of two machines the Naval Oceanographic Office is buying in a deal IBM said is worth tens of millions of dollars.

The flagship system is a cluster of 386 eight-processor p655 machines, which use IBM's Power4+ processor and its AIX version of Unix, according to IBM. It also includes a 55-terabyte FastT storage system. The second and smaller supercomputer, with 64 eight-processor p655 systems, has a speed of 3.5 teraflops.

The Navy office is an established supercomputer customer. In 2001, it purchased a Cray SV1ex for the task, and in 2002, added an IBM machine called Blue Ocean.

IBM is several years into a campaign to topple Hewlett-Packard, the No. 1 company in the high-performance computing market. Big Blue has had some success, returning to dominance on the Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers this June.