The U.S. Department of Energy has reached an agreement with IBM to bring Mira to the Illinois-based Argonne National Lab. The facility currently utilizes Intrepid, a 557 teraflop supercomputer ranked the third most powerful system of its kind in 2008.  Mira, in turn, is an IBM Blue Gene Q 10-petaflop supercomputer scheduled to become operational in 2012, and overthrow the world’s current most powerful supercomputer, the 2.57 petaflops Tianhe-1A system based in Tianjin, China.  “Meanwhile, another even more powerful computer, also an IBM Blue Gene Q, is going to Lawrence Livermore Labs next year,” reports AllThingsD. “This one will be a 20-petaflop monster named ‘Sequoia.'”

IBM has been occupied lately, and not just with its supercomputers. IBM and Samsung announced a few minutes ago a patent cross-license agreement which will allow the two to ‘collaborate’ parts of their partner portfolios. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, however this move is meant to significantly push both of the companies’ R&D efforts.

In addition to Samsung, Oracle announced it has agreed to share governance of the OpenJDK Java community with IBM. This is not good news for the open-source community, but it is for IBM, which has great interest in the language.

IBM stirred a lot of buzz around its supercomputers recently, and we’ve been there to deliver the SiliconANGLE on the news. The company recently announced ‘racetrack memory‘ which has the potential to revolutionize storage by the hundredfold, and we also discussed the upcoming Jeopardy! IBM supercomputer vs. Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter competition.