IBM announced that Japan’s largest national research organization has ordered an IBM eServer Linux supercomputer that when completed will deliver more than 11 trillion calculations per second, making it the world's most powerful Linux-based supercomputer. It is even expected to be more powerful than the Linux cluster currently ranked as the third most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to the independent TOP500 List of Supercomputers.

 The supercomputer is planned to be integrated with other non-Linux systems to form a massive, distributed computing Grid - enabling collaboration between corporations, academia and government - to support various research including grid technologies, life sciences, bioinformatics and nanotechnology.

The system with a total of 2636 processors will include 1058 eServer 325 systems with 2116 AMD Opteron processors. The powerful new supercomputer will help Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), well known worldwide for its leading research in Grid technologies, to accelerate research using grid technology for a wide variety of projects. These projects include the search for new materials to be used for super conductors and fuel cell batteries, and the search for new compounds that could be the basis for a cure for various malignant diseases.

The new IBM eServer 325 systems to be delivered to AIST each contain two powerful AMD Opteron processors in a 1U (1.75") rack mounted form factor. AIST will run SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on the supercomputer. The Grid will incorporate the Globus Toolkit 3.0 and the Open Grid Services Infrastructure. The Grid is planned to link heterogeneous and geographically dispersed computing resources, including servers, storage and data, allowing researchers to collaborate.

Using the eServer 325 IBM delivered world record performance for database clusters on a processor intensive decision support application performance measure. According to the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-H benchmark, DB2 Universal Database, eight IBM eServer 325, with 64-bit AMD Opteron processors running the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 operating system, delivered 12214 QphH@100GB at a cost of $70 per QphH@100 GB. These results toppled an HP system running Oracle from the top cluster performance spot, delivering five times better price/performance and more than two times better overall performance, IBM said.

The eServer 325 systems with 2116 AMD Opteron processors is expected to deliver 8.464 teraflops of processing power. The 520 Intel Xeon processors are expected to deliver 2.704 teraflops of processing power for a total of 11.168 teraflops.