German chemical giant BASF is on the verge of creating the most powerful R&D computer in the biz.
The company recently announced that it is joining forces with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to make a supercomputer that could shorten the wait for R&D calculations from months to days.
The custom-built computer, which will be based on HPE Apollo 6000 systems, will have a processing speed of 1 petaflop, allowing it to handle one quadrillion operations a second. It will have several hundred computer nodes, that will be able to work simultaneously on complex tasks.
The computer will also expand the company’s research capabilities so that it can run virtual experiments. For example, the computer will speed up the creation of new polymers with predefined properties and more accurately simulate processes on catalyst surfaces.
"In today's data-driven economy, high performance computing plays a pivotal role in driving advances in space exploration, biology and artificial intelligence," Meg Whitman, president and CEO of HPE, said. "We expect this supercomputer to help BASF perform prodigious calculations at lightning fast speeds, resulting in a broad range of innovations to solve new problems and advance our world."
BASF anticipates that the computer, which is being built at its headquarters in Germany, will significantly shorten the time it takes to develop new products and bring them to market. Although the computer will be the fastest in the industry, BASF also predicts that other major companies will soon follow suit.