IBM and Nvidia are developing new generation supercomputers

In 2011, IBM showed a technological breakthrough when the Watson supercomputer defeated the champions of the game show “Jeopardy”. And now the company wants to reboot its high-performance Power servers, using the graphics processor for the first time.







Starting next year, IBM will start using Nvidia's Tesla GPUs in servers with Power chips, thanks to which there are supercomputers such as Watson, Seqoia and others.



The agreement concluded between corporations will unite the new Tesla K40 GPU and the upcoming IBM Power8 processor.

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As for performance, the new K40 has 2880 CUDA cores and is based on GDD5 graphics memory with a clock frequency of 3 GHz. The basic version of the Tesla K40 has 12 GB of memory. The new Power8 processor is manufactured using the 22nm SOI process technology, it contains 12 processing cores operating at 4 GHz, 12 x 0.5 MB second-level cache and 96 MB shared third-level cache (eDRAM).



The alliance between IBM and Nvidia will not only increase our chances to hear about new amazing records in the world of supercomputers, but also help business partners to process and analyze data faster (this is especially important for such critical tasks as financial transaction processing).