IBM and NVIDIA give US supercomputers a brain boost

US supercomputers are having to grow up, with a wider set of tasks the machines at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories are being asked to do by the researchers, national security teams, and others given access to them demanding a change in architecture in order to keep them flexible. IBM and NVIDIA are upgrading two supercomputers - Sierra at Lawrence Livermore, and Summit at Oak Ridge - using IBM's support for the open-source OpenPOWER standard, increasing the interconnect speed of the CPU and GPU processors responsible for doing all the heavy-duty crunching. In fact, so the companies claim, there'll be as much as a tenfold cut in processing time for real-world applications.