IBM lands USD 1.4 mln servers and storage deal for Romanian national scientific projects

IBM has been selected infrastructure provider for six Romanian organizations partnering on the Romania's National Computing Initiative (RoGrid), aimed at supporting national scientific projects. RoGrid selected IBM servers and storage in deals with a combined value of USD 1.4 million to support projects across the fields of medicine, environment and life sciences. RoGrid will use 286 compute nodes of IBM System x and BladeCenter servers at six Romanian universities that are linked together using cloud computing technologies. This will provide RoGrid with an overall computing capacity of 25.7 trillion calculations per second and a storage capacity equivalent to the contents of books made from 6.5 million trees. IBM has already installed the computing infrastructure at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, the Western University of Timisoara, the University of Craiova, the Oncology Institute of Bucharest, the Politehnica University of Bucharest and the Fine Mechanics Institute of Bucharest. The project is important to Romania providing computational power to over 50 researchers working on 10 scientific projects. Several projects have already benefitted from the new system, including AeroLink, a high performance network to support aeronautical research, Knowledge Extraction, a project that uses intelligent agents to extract knowledge from unstructured data and Extrem-Grid, a project to analyze the vital parameters of persons under extreme conditions such as high altitudes or speeds and traveling through space. “Cloud computing systems are key to national research projects as they provide access to massive computational power by linking a number of geographically distributed resources as one integrated system, helping to cut costs and reduce development time," said Professor Doina Banciu, PhD, General Director of the National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics and a National Representative in the European Grid Initiative. editor@romania-insider.com