Though its sales have hurt, profit margins have got quite well.  These guys have ramped up their earnings forecast for the year and according to some reports, there are some healthy sign of growth in the company’s revenues and it is indeed a somewhat hard to find confidence sign for a great corporation like IBM.

Accenture Ltd is quite well-known as an IBM rival in outsourcing and consulting says that about the current market situation that there are only a few opportunities in the higher end services this year.

A similar sort of statement also came from Dell this week as it said that the company is facing problems to sell its PCs to different businesses. However, IBM seems quite confident though its sales have slipped in Q2, it’s expecting to earn good profits this year.

One of which will be used in 2012 making the total of 20 petaflops in all. This will, according to an estimate, work 20 times faster than any of the most powerful systems available today.

These systems, classified as IBM BlueGene-class, will be used for U.S nuclear analysis.

They will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where IBM BlueGene/L systems are currently used. One of the IBM BlueGene/P systems will be delivered in April.

The other one called Sequoia will be installed in 2012. These systems have the capability of up to 500 teraflops.

Manager in IBM’s deep computing group, Herb Schultz says, “The Sequoia system will be 15 times faster than BlueGene/P with roughly the same footprint and a modest increase in power consumption.”

A principal investigator for supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore, Mark Seager says, “IBM’s BlueGene proposal exceeded our requirements while consuming less than half the power of its closest competitor and less than a third of the most power hungry,”

He further added, “That is a savings of more than 35 megawatts for the lifetime of the machine and translates to a savings of $24.5 million and 108 kilotons less carbon dioxide expended,”

NNSA administrator Thomas D’Agostino said in a press statement, “These powerful machines will provide NNSA with the capabilities needed to resolve time-urgent and complex scientific problems, ensuring the viability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent into the future”.