IBM has received an order for a supercomputer by the American government. IBM will build two new supercomputers for the USA and the first will be ready to rock in April. This system is based on the BlueGene/P platform and will sport 500 Teraflops capacity, which will be enough for top 3 on the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. This is nothing compared to the system IBM is expected to deliver in 2012.
It is called Sequoia and will use 45nm processors that might house up to 16 processor cores each. With a 96 rack system Sequoia will scale up to 1.6 million processor cores fed with 1.6 Petabyte RAM.
This will result in performance up to 15 times higher than the first BlueGene/P system it will install this year and it will do so without needing more space or consume a lot more power.
The performance will scale up to over 20 Petaflops, which is a huge number in the world of supercomputers. The power will among others be used by NNSA to analyze USA’s storage of nuclear power but also other kinds of scientific research.
BlueGene/P
