To controversy, NSF taps IBM, U of Illinois for supercomputer

The National Science Foundation has chosen to IBM to help it build the world's fastest supercomputer at a cost of up to $400 million, The New York Times reports. The news of the contract award only escaped because relevant documents were mistakenly placed on a federal Website for a short time last week, the Times said. The machine will be housed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign That decision irks California and Pennsylvania, where governement labs also bid for a role in the supercomputer.

The new computer is to be the first supercomputer capable of one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second — a computing benchmark known as a petaflop. ... The machine will become a magnet for the world’s most advanced and challenging scientific research projects. Unlike many academic research supercomputers in the United States that serve a large community of users, the supercomputer will concentrate on a handful of Grand Challenge science projects, like simulating the impact of global warming.

The award to the University of Illinois might be seen as a sign of the ongoing poor fortunes of the University of California. For 20 years, the government's fastest computing power resided under the auspices of Lawrence Berkeley National Library in labs at Los Alamos, NM and Livermore, CA. After a series of debacles in the running of Los Alamos, UC was forced to take a greatly reduced role. And now the world's fastest supercomputer is not going to Lawrence Berkeley or Los Alamos.

“The process needs to be above all suspicion,” said Horst D. Simon, associate laboratory director for computing sciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. “It’s in the interest of the national community that there is not even a cloud of suspicion, and there already is one.”

There is also a second award, by which NSF will install a Cray supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, but the machine would be operated by a Dept. of Energy lab.

A researcher for the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center who identified himself as “grouchyoldcoot” in a Web blog posting, last week wrote: “Having the N.S.F. buy a machine and hand it to the D.O.E. is, well, very unexpected — the D.O.E. has plenty of machines of its own, and the N.S.F. wants to get its work done, not the D.O.E.’s.” The posting was removed on Thursday, but not before it was circulated among supercomputer researchers.