ARMONK, N.Y. - 12 Apr 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new workload-optimized POWER7® systems, including a performance boost to the Power 750 -- the same server used in Watson, the Jeopardy! winner -- that provides even faster processing capability than each machine used in the computer genius.
The new Power blades and upgraded Power servers are built to manage the world's most demanding emerging applications, used in healthcare management, financial services, scientific research and more. The specialized demands of these new applications rely on processing an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analyzing that information in real time.
The enhanced IBM Power 750, the same system that powers Watson, has been enhanced with several options, including a faster POWER7 processor, to handle the most challenging analytics workloads.
For instance, the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth is using two IBM POWER7 blades to study the effect of disturbances, called gravitational waves, on black holes in space. Increased knowledge of gravitational waves will help physicists and astronomers to understand some of the most fundamental laws of physics. They will provide new information about the dynamics of large-scale events in the Universe, like the death of stars and the birth of black holes.
"We are running billions of intense calculations based on Einstein's theory of relativity on the POWER7 blades," said Gaurav Khanna, professor of physics at UMass-Dartmouth. "Running POWER7, I'm able to get results as much as eight times faster than running the same calculations on an Intel Xeon processor. Calculations that used to take a month to run are now finished in less than a week. This means that I can do eight times more science in the same timeframe than I could do before."