Big Blue Supercomputer: The Next Generation

supercomputer

According to a press release, NNSA has selected Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the development of two new IBM supercomputing systems, Sequoia and Dawn. Sequoia will include 1.6 million IBM Power processors housed in 96 racks the size of refrigerators, and occupy 3,422 square feet. It will be a 20 petaflop per second system based on future BlueGene technology to be delivered in 2011 and deployed in 2012. It also will have 1.6 petabytes of memory and 96,304 compute nodes.

Dawn is a 500 teraflop-per-second initial delivery BlueGene/P system, scheduled for delivery in the first quarter of 2009. According to the release, Dawn will provide the applications foundation for multipetaflop per second computing on Sequoia.

If all goes according to plan, Sequoia's 20 petaflops per second speed would make it 10 times faster than any other existing system.

Both Sequoia and Dawn will be used for NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. IBM and NNSA researchers cited such abilities in a 20 petaflops per second supercomputer as a 40-times jump in some weather-monitoring capabilities (for example, the path of a tornado would become mappable down to a kilometer's accuracy) and a 50-times improvement in predicting earthquakes and identifying safe evacuation routes.

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"The longstanding partnership of NNSA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and IBM is ushering in an era of multipetaflop computing," said NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino. "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. This endeavor will also help maintain U.S. leadership in high -performance computing and promote scientific discovery."

When last we heard from IBM on the supercomputing front, its 1.105 petaflop per second IBM Roadrunner was besting other supercomputers to reclaim the TOP500 organization's fastest supercomputer crown in November 2008.