IBM to build 20 petaflops supercomputer | | 2009-02-05 | | | IBM has been commissioned by the US government to build a massive supercomputer that will be twenty times faster than the current record holder (IBM’s 1 Petaflop Roadrunner at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).The new machine, dubbed Sequoia, will perform at 20 Petaflops per second - the equivalent of 2 million laptops, and is projected to have 1.6TB of memory. The system will run Linux.Sequoia will be built at Lawrence Livermore for the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the US Department of Energy, and will be used for simulating nuclear tests. Other potential applications include weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, oil exploration, economic modelling and pharmaceutical testing.Sequoia is expected to contain more than 1.6 million processors, probably IBM Power chips. It will be housed in 96 refrigerator racks covering 3,422 square feet (318 square meters). When completed, IBM claim Sequoia will be more powerful than the combined performance of all the systems on the Top500 list.A smaller 500-teraflop machine, Dawn, has also been commissioned to act as an application foundation for Sequoia. Both machines will be built at IBM’s Blue Gene facilities in Rochester, Minnesota at an undisclosed cost. | |
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