February 2, 2009 by Jay Smith
IBM is poised to announce that it will be constructing the world’s fastest supercomputer for the US Department of Energy. The machine, named Sequoia, will be the fastest supercomputer ever built and will significantly outperform the current holder of that title, roadrunner – also built by IBM.
Technical information is understandably scarce but it is thought that Sequoia will be able to run at 20 petaflops (a petaflop means a quadrillion calculations per second). If you consider that Roadrunner was the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops then you start to see the level of performance and the leap in technology we’re talking about. According to Reuters, Sequoia will have the equivalent power of 2 million standard laptops.
Sequoia’s home is to be the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it will be used to run simulations, designed to test the U.S’s nuclear weaponry stockpile for soundness.
IBM say that Sequoia is energy efficient. However, it is still going to use over 6 megawatts of per year, roughly the energy use of 500 homes.
Unfortunately, sources indicate the supercomputer is predicted to have trouble running Windows Vista… Sorry, I couldn’t resist the obvious joke.
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