Sneak Peek: IBM's New Supercomputer

We told you yesterday about IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration unveiling plans for IBM to build what it hopes will be the most powerful supercomputer in the world.

By the numbers, IBM's Sequoia will:

-- include 1.6 million IBM power processors housed in 96 racks the size of refrigerators;

-- occupy 3,422 square feet at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory;

-- boast a 20 petaflop-per-second system based on BlueGene technology;

-- use 1.6 petabytes of memory;

-- contain 96,304 compute nodes.

Dawn, the initial delivery BlueGene/P system, rocks at 500 teraflops per second.

If it hums like it's supposed to, IBM said, Sequoia's 20 petaflops-per-second speed would make it 10 times faster than any other existing supercomputer.

Sweet system? They think so. Here's a quick look at IBM researcher Shawn Hall, who's shown inspecting Sequoia.

Shawn Hall and Sequoia