International Business Machines Corp.(IBM) has entered into a joint research agreement with SARA, a Dutch National High Performance Computing and e-Science Support Center. The two companies will be pooling their resources in petascale computing to facilitate functioning of applications on next-generation super computers.
Petascale, in the computing sense, is the computer system which can reach a speed of over one petaflop or one quadrillion floating point operations per second.
Earlier, IBM and SARA had joined forces for the purpose of research in the high performance computing field. This new agreement will strengthen their relationship.
Officials from SARA commented that the partnership with IBM is necessary for petaflop supercomputers, as it consists of numerous processor cores. Thus, the collaborative research and development warrants the efficient management of the system.
IBM and SARA have come together to conduct research for the smooth and essential functioning of the petaflop systems, that includes deploying new programming tools and support to numerous essential cores and other related work. For this operation, the SARA Huygens cluster will be used along with IBM platforms like IBM 575 technology and IBM POWER 755 test systems.
The research facility of SARA in Amsterdam has been a hub for scientists in solving scientific as well as social issues that stretches from climate change, water management, and improvement of medical care to nanotechnology and green energy. IBM’s endeavor to help SARA will not only enable it to gain traction among the research community in the Netherlands, but will also strengthen IBM’s research activities related to the development of supercomputers with multiple petaflops.
We believe that over the long term, IBM will continue to benefit from its spate of new initiatives like smarter planet, business analytics, optimization, cloud computing and other computing ventures. Additionally, IBM’s growth initiatives will be a major revenue generator in the near future.
As a matter of fact, in 2010, IBM had generated 29.0% of its total systems revenues from these markets. The company expects revenue from these markets to grow at least 40% by 2015.
However, IBM continues to face stiff competition from a number of companies, including Hewlett Packard Co. (HPQ), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Oracle Corp. (ORCL) and EMC Corp. (EMC).
We remain Neutral over the long term (6-12 months) based on the belief that the company’s shares are fairly valued at current levels.
Currently, IBM has a Zacks #3 Rank, which implies a short-term Hold rating.
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