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Supercomputers Stalk Wall Street

Supercomputers, which have traditionally been associated with the likes of NASA and Los Alamos National Lab, are now being touted as a solution for Wall Street data centers.

Speaking at this weeks Linux on Wall Street conference, Leonard Santalucia, a specialist from IBM Corp.'s (NYSE: IBM) eServer Linux impact team, explained how the hardware giant is targeting its 360-TeraFlop BlueGene/L at the financial sector.

Supercomputers conjure up images of rooms chock-full of hardware, although Santalucia says the BlueGene/L has a much smaller footprint than is usual in high-performance computing. “It could sit on this small stage,” he said, during a presentation at the Roosevelt Hotel, gesturing to an area of around 300 hundred square feet.

”You will be able to swallow up a lot of your clusters with this guy,” he added.

Space is a major concern in data centers at the moment, as IT managers struggle to fit new IT kit into increasingly cramped spaces. This situation, in turn, brings with it additional pressures around power supplies and cooling (see Afcom Chief: Watch for Hot Air ).

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