IBM to build Spanish supercomputer

The Spanish government agreed a €70m deal today with IBM to build the world's second most powerful supercomputer and the most powerful one in Europe.

The system will be at the heart of a planned national supercomputer centre for scientific research on medicine, climate change, and new materials for aeronautics and mechanical engineering.

The 60-tonne system, to be built in Catalonia, will comprise 4,500 processors, have a storage capacity of 128 terabytes and use the Linux operating system, the government said.

The world's biggest supercomputer is the 40-teraflop Earth Simulator built by NEC in Yokohama, Japan.