IBM has announced a new line-up of next-generation processor systems and blades, high speed connectivity and coprocessor acceleration technology for the IBM System Cluster 1350.

With its improved ability to handle a broad range of application environments and capability to scale up to 1,024 nodes, the System Cluster 1350 is a primary choice for building supercomputing solutions for a variety of industries including financial services, industrial, petroleum and life sciences.

"The IBM System Cluster 1350 provides clients with an arsenal of technologies to tackle the challenges of high performance computing environments, while reducing the complexity and risk of configuring, deploying and managing Linux clusters," said Wendy McGee, director, IBM Cluster Solutions. "We've collaborated with leading-edge processor, accelerator and networking companies to provide clients unprecedented levels of speed, choice and flexibility with this offering."

One higher education client, Indiana University (IU), recently flipped the switch on the 23rd most powerful supercomputer in the world, "Big Red," to support research into new discoveries in the life sciences, astronomy, informatics, computational physics and the humanities. IU's new Cluster 1350 can perform more than 20.4 trillion numerical operations per second.

At the dedication ceremony for Big Red in August, IU Provost Michael A. McRobbie said, "The first supercomputer IU acquired after my arrival in 1997 had a peak processing power of roughly 25 billion mathematical operations per second. Just one of the 512 individual computing blades in Big Red is capable of more computation than that entire supercomputer in 1997. In fact, Big Red is capable of nearly 1,000 times more computation."

IU Associate Vice President for Information Technology Craig Stewart said, "A critical element of Big Red's value to the local and national scientific communities is the integration of this computational power in IU's local cyberinfrastructure, which provides excellent support for data-centric research, as well as the availability of Big Red to the national research community via the TeraGrid." Big Red will support a variety of research applications, but will be targeted particularly toward support for the life sciences.

Biopharmaceutical company Telik has put its System Cluster 1350 to work to find new cures for cancer. According to Telik, it has experienced a 5x improvement in processing power utilizing the cluster technology for its complex research.

"We're dedicated to discovering, developing and bringing new treatments to market as fast as possible. IBM's System Cluster 1350 has allowed us to complete calculations 50 times faster than our previous solutions, and since our compute jobs can run for several months, the Linux operating system offers reliability that is critical in our drug development," said Robert T. Lum, Ph.D., Vice President, Preclinical Development, Telik.