IBM is investing $325 million to install the world's most advanced supercomputing systems at two national laboratories, as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's "Coral" project.
California's Lawrence Livermore (pictured) and Tennessee's Oak Ridge national labs will use the data-centric machines to work toward advances in science, engineering, and national security.
"Today's announcement marks a shift from traditional supercomputing approaches that are no longer viable as data grows at enormous rates," Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of the IBM Systems and Technology Group, said in a statement.
Labs like Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore feel the strain of trying to mine an ever-expanding trove of big data, which is now more than 2.5 billion gigabytes per day (about 250 million football fields full of books)/ According to IBM, researchers just don't have the time or energy to wade through so much data. Which is where the tech giant's new "data centric" method comes in.
Using the NVLink interconnect technology from chip maker Nvidia, the machines will be able to carry out calculations five to 12 times faster than even the country's most advanced systems.
"IBM's Data Centric approach is a new paradigm in computing, marking the future of open computing platforms and capable of addressing the growing rates of data," Rosamilia said. "The beauty of the systems being developed for Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge is that the core technologies are available today to organizations of many sizes across many industries."
The "Sierra" supercomputer at Livermore and "Summit" machine at Oak Ridge are also five times more energy-efficient than the labs' current options.
Installation of the room-sized systems is expected to begin in 2017, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported that IBM will spend another $100 million on the continued development of "extreme scale" supercomputing technology.
The hardware maker is, of course, no stranger to supercomputers: IBM's famous Watson machine has been making great strides in the fields of science and health since its 2011 debut on Jeopardy.
But IBM isn't the only one dabbling in high-tech computing: Seattle-based Cray was awarded a $174 million contract in July to develop a new machine to manage nuclear weapons.