IBM forms research partnership with Irish universities

IBM has formed a multi-million euro partnership with Irish universities to research massively powerful super-computers which it expects to change the future of computing.

Under the agreement, from next January 40 researchers will be employed at Trinity College Dublin, the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), University College Cork (UCC) and the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) to work on the project. 

Each institute will be involved in a different component of the research related to its own area of expertise with the ultimate aim of producing computers that are 500 million times more powerful than the typical home PC.

David Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM, said the research into exascale computing would lay the foundations for computing in 8 to 9 years time.

Exascale computing is the development of machines capable of performing a billion billion calculations per second or broadly equivalent to the world's entire existing computing power.

While the project is expected to run for up to five years Mr Turek hopes it would go on to form the basis for future research areas, adding this area of computing was developing exceptionally quickly.

"As every year goes by you will see progressively greater and greater investment in these kinds of technologies for a new style of computing."

He said the partnership with the Irish universities, which is being supported by IDA Ireland was IBM's largest research project in this area and said the level of investment was of the magnitude required at the start of a strategic computing project.

Aside from developing massive processing power, IBM is also looking at ways of making super-computers more energy efficient.

Mr Turek also said it was important ordinary people were able to operate and programme exascale machines.

The need for increasingly powerful super computers is due to the increasing complexity and volume of decision-making data available, he said.

The global efforts to combat the financial crisis were an example, he said, of the type of situations where a government or policymaker may want to run a massively complex computer simulation to try and predict its impact, before pursuing a particular policy.

Computing is moving away from storing data and then mining it later on to a model where the volume of data was so immense that a computer tries "real-time analytics".

One example of this are social networking sites which bring together tremendous amounts of information about how people make decisions. Mr Turek and this kind of data creates an opportunity to create "a much richer profile" of decisions.

Mr Turek declined to comment on the level of financial commitment being provided by IBM, saying that intellectual property was part of its commitment and placing a value on this was difficult.

"This is the most significant project we [IBM] have at an exascale-level computing right now."

Part of the motivation behind the project was the development of a "cadre of expertise in Irish universities and institutes that we hope will become more critical over a longer timescale than what is planned by this programme."

IBM chose to locate this project in Ireland because of the success of previous software projects here. "It was a logical and natural decision," Mr Turek said.

IBM also announced plans for a collaboration between researchers in University of Limerick and the IBM Watson Centre at its Dublin Technology Campus to design a new generation of data centres.