Researchers at IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have announced an HPC collaboration called Deep Computing Solutions to take place within LLNL’s High Performance Computing Innovation Center (HPCIC).

The HPCIC was created to help American industry harness the power of supercomputing to better compete in the global marketplace. Deep Computing Solutions will add IBM’s computational science expertise to LLNL’s own, for the benefit of Deep Computing Solution’s clients.

LLNL’s HPCIC aims to become the nation’s premier provider of advanced computing solutions to understand and manage complex systems that underlie 21st century technology. Working within the HPCIC, Deep Computing Solutions will deploy the complementary strengths of IBM and LLNL to develop and implement industrial strength solutions that can help address its clients’ enterprise-critical problems.

Computer and domain science experts from IBM Research and LLNL will work together with a broad range of American industry collaborators to devise HPC solutions that can help accelerate the development of new technologies, products and services. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: applied energy; green energy, including renewable(s); biology; materials science; fabrication; manufacturing; data management; and informatics.

LLNL has procured a five-petaflop (quadrillion floating point operations per second) system to support HPCIC and Deep Computing Solutions efforts as well as unclassified National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) research programs, academic alliances and LLNL institutional science and technology efforts.

Called Vulcan, the new 24-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q system based on the POWER architecture will be delivered in Summer 2012. Vulcan is part of the contract that brought Sequoia, the 20-petaflop Blue Gene/Q machine recently ranked no. 1 on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, to Livermore.