17
2001
The U.S. Government dedicates
ASCI
White, the world's fastest supercomputer at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California.
ASCI
White, an
IBM
system, covers a space the
size of two basketball courts and weighs 106 tons. It contains six trillion bytes (
TB
) of memory,
almost 50,000 times greater than the average personal computer, and has more than 160
TB
of
IBM
TotalStorage 7133 Serial Disk System capacity enough to hold six Library of Congress
book collections.
IBM
and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announce they
will jointly design a new supercomputer in the Blue Gene family. Called Blue Gene/L, the
machine will be at least 15 times faster, 15 times more power efficient and consume about 50
times less space per computation than today's fastest supercomputers.
The U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research selects
IBM
to provide the world's powerful
supercomputer for predicting climate changes. Code named Blue Sky, the system will be
powered by
IBM
's
SP
supercomputer and
IBM
eServer p690 systems, and is designed to achieve
a peak speed of seven trillion calculations per second with 31.5 trillion bytes of
IBM
SSA
disk
storage.
IBM
and The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (
NCSA
) at the University of
Illinois announce that
NCSA
will install two
IBM
Linux clusters, creating the world's fastest
Linux supercomputer in academia. The clusters will have two teraflops of computing power and
will be used by researchers to study fundamental scientific questions, such as the nature of
gravity waves first predicted by Albert Einstein.
NASA
astronauts on
Atlantis
and
Discovery
shuttle missions successfully store and bring back
digital images on
IBM
's award winning one gigabyte, one inch
IBM
Microdrive.
IBM
researchers discover a new process for manufacturing computer displays that can vastly
improve screen quality and viewing angles while saving manufacturers millions of dollars.
IBM
achieves a breakthrough method to alter silicon the fundamental material at the heart of
microchips which is expected to boost chip speeds by up to 35 percent. Called Strained
Silicon, the technology stretches the material, speeding the flow of electrons through transistors
to increase performance and decrease power consumption in semiconductors.
Scientists at
IBM
's Almaden Research Center perform the world's most complicated quantum
computer calculation to date. They cause a billion billion custom designed molecules in a test
tube to become a seven qubit quantum computer to solve a simple version of the mathematical
problem at the heart of today's data security cryptographic systems.
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