IBM goes back to school

IBM has announced that it will establish a centre for developing products and applications using its advanced Cell processor technology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

The new 185.8 square metre Future Technology Solution Design Center will be staffed with five IBM employees. IBM has invested $3.8m in the centre, including equipment and staffing costs, with lab space and datacentre support leased from the university.

Academic institutions and business customers will have access to the centre to design, test and optimise new devices based on IBM’s ‘supercomputer on a chip’ technology.

‘We chose Indiana for this centre because of the close proximity of leading institutions like IU, IU School of Medicine and Purdue, as well as its well-earned reputation as a hot bed of life sciences expertise,’ said Dr Robert Eades, manager of the centre. ‘We believe we can couple this expertise with the advanced capabilities of our Cell technology to benefit not only medicine, but a broad range of industries and applications.’

The Cell processor is an advanced chip developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, with up to nine processor cores that allow it to operate at speeds up to 5GHz. This allows developers to equip relatively small devices with very large amounts of processing power.