IBM seals super-computing deal with Irish universities

IBM has formed a multi-million-euro partnership with Irish universities to research powerful super-computers which it expects to change the future of computing.

Under the deal, 40 researchers will from next January be employed at Trinity College Dublin, the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), University College Cork (UCC) and the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) on the project.

Each institute will be involved in a different component of the research related to its own area of expertise with the ultimate aim of producing computers that are 500 million times more powerful than the typical home PC.

David Turek, vice-president of deep computing at IBM, said the research into exascale computing would lay the foundations for computing in eight to nine years' time.

Exascale computing is the development of machines capable of performing a billion billion calculations per second, or broadly equivalent to the world's entire existing computing power.

While the project is expected to run for up to five years, Mr Turek hopes it will go on to form the basis for future research areas. He said this area of computing was developing exceptionally quickly.

The partnership with Irish universities, which is being supported by IDA Ireland, is IBM's largest research project in this area.

The need for increasingly powerful super-computers is due to the increasing complexity and volume of decision-making data available, Mr Turek said.

Global efforts to combat the financial crisis were an example, he said, of the type of situations where a government or policymaker may want to run a massively complex computer simulation to try and predict the impact of a policy before pursuing it.

He declined to comment on the level of financial commitment being provided by IBM.

IBM chose to locate the project in Ireland because of the success of previous software projects here. "It was a logical and natural decision," Mr Turek said.