Slovak Academy of Science Chooses IBM for National HPC Project

IBM Corp. announced that the Slovak Academy of Science has chosen IBM technology to launch an HPC project in Slovakia.

Working with local business partner DATALAN, a.s., IBM will provide a 96 teraflop supercomputer based on IBM’s Power 775 and 755 systems and DS5300 storage.

The supercomputer will be deployed for scientific research requiring high computing capacity in physical chemistry, biochemistry, materials sciences, particle physics, quantum physics, virology, biomechanics and astrophysics.

"This is an important technology acquisition for the entire Slovak science research and education community," said Tomas Lacko, Data Center Director at the Slovak Academy of Science. "Having a supercomputer of this magnitude in our country could open many new opportunities in developing our national infrastructure and advancing applied research in automotive, pharmaceutical, biotechnology and other sectors of our economy."

The supercomputer will be shared by three departments of the Slovak Academy of Science (Computer Center, IT Institute in Bratislava and Institute of Experimental Physics in Kosice) and a consortium of four major universities (Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Zilina University, Matej Bel University in Banska Bystrica and Technical University in Kosice). It will also be made available for use by the broader academic community in Slovakia.

"IBM has long played an important role in the development of Slovakia’s public and private sector infrastructures," said Branislav Sebo, Country General Manager, IBM Slovakia. "With this deal, science and education in Slovakia are entering a new era and opening up new research possibilities in the country."

The Slovak Academy of Science joins a number of other companies and organizations in Central and Eastern Europe which have purchased IBM systems of late. IBM’s other recent agreements in the region include those with Guarantee Fund of Bulgaria; Erste & Steiermarkische of Croatia; West University of Timisoara in Romania; Raiffeisen Bank in the Czech Republic;  Societe Generale in Serbia; PRAVEX-BANK in Ukraine; Sberbank, Rosbank and Alfa-Bank of Russia;  Agora SA and PKO Bank Polski of Poland.

About the technology
The IBM Power 755 is a HPC cluster node with 32 POWER7 processor cores that is optimized for running parallel computationally intensive workloads and algorithms such as weather and climate modeling, computational chemistry, physics and petroleum reservoir modeling. Dubbed a ‘data center in a rack,’ IBM’s Power Systems 775 features a departure from the rest of the POWER7 family. The HPC is water cooled and serves as a data center in a single rack and is designed for organizations that require a scalable system with parallel processing performance and dense, modular packaging. It is designed for clustered configurations of as few as 256 processor cores or in supercomputer configurations of hundreds of thousands of processors. Combined with specialized software from IBM, this system is designed to perform and represents the latest Power technology available.

The IBM System Storage DS5000 series is designed to meet demanding requirements, being built on decades of design expertise.