The Department of Energy has awarded a $325 million contract to IBM to create two supercomputers that will be at least three times more powerful than any existing systems in deployment today. IBM’s partners in this endeavor will be Nvidia and Mellanox.

The current leader is Tianhe-2 (Milky Way 2), a Chinese supercomputer with a theoretical max of 55 petaflops built with Xeon E5 processors and Xeon Phi co-processors. It may or may not be surpassed when the new Top500 supercomputer list comes out this week. Either way, a 165 petaFLOP supercomputer is a tall order.

The DoE supercomputer will use a mix of IBM Power 8 RISC CPUs, Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs and NVlink GPU interconnects, and Mellanox’s 100Gbit/sec. InfiniBand interconnects. The system is expected to be installed in 2017.

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