IBM Supercomputer pushes ahead with 20 petaflops or the power of 2 million laptops for nuclear weapons research.
A frequent record setter and pioneer in the world of supercomputing, IBM today announced that their new “Sequoia” project, built in co-operation with the U.S. Department of Energy for their next generation supercomputer will be installed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California and completely shatter any previous records by leaps and bounds.
IBM set records a few months ago with the successful launch of their Roadrunner system, currently being used for top-secret extraterrestrial research (j/k) at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. Roadrunner was the first supercomputer to break the petaflop barrier (or 1.1 quadrillion calculation per second).
Now it appears that IBM is taking it one step further, or maybe 19 steps further with Sequoia which is set to have a surprising 20 petaflops of compute power equivalent to about 20 million of today’s laptops. What’s even more impressive is that IBM predicts Sequoia will be faster than all super computers on the Top 500 supercomputing rankings, combined. Sequoia will primarily be used for nuclear weapon testing but some say that more positive uses such as weather prediction models and earthquake simulation are on the agenda as well.
Sequoia will certainly be a monster taking up more than 95 racks of space at Lawrence Livermore Labs but will not be as large as previous supercomputers taking up around 3,400 square feet. IBM has not released how many cores each processor will have but they did mention that it will contain an impressive 1.5 million processing cores and 98,304 computing nodes! It will also use a massive 1.6 petabytes of memory in its refrigerated cabinets.
IBM plans to have the system online by 2012, years before analysts believed they would even see the 10-petaflop barrier being broken.
IBM continues to build on a strong tradition of supercomputing with the last 3 of 4 records held by the Armonk, New York tech giant.
