IBM Readies E-Business On-Demand Supercomputing FacilitiesIBM Readies E-Business On-Demand Supercomputing Facilities

In its latest move to promote utility computing, IBM said Thursday that it's creating E-business on-demand facilities to provide supercomputing services for specific vertical industries. To kick off this initiative, IBM is spending millions of dollars to create a facility on its Poughkeepsie, N.Y., campus that will open in February and host IT and applications for petroleum-services companies. Depending on the center's success, IBM will build similar facilities worldwide and look to address other industries, including life sciences.

The Poughkeepsie facility's first customer is Petroleum Geo-Services ASA, a Norwegian provider of marine seismic data, onshore surveying, and oil and gas production services mainly in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Petroleum Geo-Services plans to use IBM's on-demand supercomputing capacity to process data and images during a three-month project of deepwater seismic exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. The company provides its data to oil companies.

IBM customers using the Poughkeepsie facility can purchase either Power or Intel processor-based computing clusters on demand and pay only for the capacity they use on a weekly basis. IBM plans to set up supercomputing-on-demand centers around the world just to meet the needs of the petroleum-services market and is in discussions with life-sciences companies for a similar model, says David Turek, VP of IBM Linux clusters and grid solutions.

Petroleum Geo-Services expects to save $1.5 million annually using the new services, with much of the savings coming from not having to lease its own Unix servers to do heavily computational work in-house. The Poughkeepsie facility will include a grid made up of hundreds of IBM p655 Unix servers and a cluster of x335 and x345 Intel-based servers running Linux.