IBM on Monday announced the expansion of computing capacity available through its Deep Computing On Demand centers, including additional access to its BlueGene supercomputer and, for the first time, the ability to utilize Unix-based capacity based on its Power5+ technology.
In addition, IBM recently announced it has achieved sustained performance of more than 200 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops) on its BlueGene system housed at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
IBM will be adding on-demand, or utility computing, capacity totaling more than 15 teraflops of computing performance based on either its BlueGene, Power5+, or Opteron BladeCenter systems, says Herb Schultz, marketing manager for BlueGene.
The on-demand centers were conceived "as a way to drive options and flexibility to customers who do want to, or need to, buy large systems," Schultz says. The on-demand capacity is available to customers seeking to address peak-cycle demands that exceed internal capacity.
"We've increased capacity primarily to meet a combination of both a demand increase and in anticipation there will be higher demand going forward," he says.
