INDUSTRY

ARMONK, N.Y. -- IBM today introduced a new option for companies that want supercomputing power, but not the fixed costs and operational responsibility of owning a supercomputer. IBM customers now have the option to either buy POWER or Intel® processor-based supercomputer clusters or access the power on demand, paying for processing power based on the required capacity and duration of use. IBM's new supercomputing e-Business on Demand service will help customers transform their businesses into organizations that more closely resemble the transparent, yet highly-responsive ecosystem of the Internet. By providing a virtualized resource that customers can draw as needed, supercomputing on demand promises to help turn fixed costs into variable costs, matching supercomputing power exactly to customer demand. Certain segments, including petroleum, digital media and life sciences, require the power of supercomputers, but only at certain times in their product development cycles. Other times, the servers they own with supercomputing capabilities sit idle, or at best under utilized. For example in Hollywood, studios need massive supercomputing power to render animation used in movies. Once the film is complete, the need goes away. The new IBM e-business on demand (tm) service is designed to provide customers with the latest technology to solve massive computational problems and they pay only for the computing power and capacity they need. The first company to access supercomputing power from IBM on demand is PGS Data Processing, a division of Petroleum Geo-Services, for an advanced seismic imaging project in the deep water Gulf of Mexico. "Seismic imaging services employ the latest numerically intensive applications, but are also highly cost competitive. PGS has been looking for a more flexible business model which addresses peak computing requirements, assures rapid response to our customers, but minimizes long term, incremental cost commitments to PGS," said Chris Usher, President of Global Data Processing. John Gillooly, Vice President of Western Hemisphere Data Processing at PGS added, "By working with IBM, we can now scale real-time to handle requests for urgent deep water imaging solutions. This new on-demand supercomputing ideally suits our business requirements, and may also stimulate time-to-market for emerging technologies that require short periods of intensive computing." "Customers in some sectors want access to large scale computing power in short bursts," said David Turek, Vice President, IBM Vice President of Linux Clusters and Grid Computing. "This supercomputing offering will change how business is done. The ability to buy computing power on-demand allows customers to save on server maintenance, management, and to scale their infrastructure rapidly, in response to business demands." IBM will create large POWER and Intel processor based supercomputer grids to support these new e-Business on Demand product offerings for customers. The initial IBM supercomputing hosting facility that will be based in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. with other national and international facilities to follow which will all be linked together. To supply the processing power for supercomputing on demand, IBM will build a grid of Intel and POWER processors. The grid will be made of a hundreds of IBM eServer (tm) p655 systems, a powerful UNIX® server that can pack as many as 128 POWER4 processors in a single frame, and a massive Linux cluster with IBM eServer x335 and x345 systems, rack-mounted servers with Intel Xeon® processors.