Sneak Peek: IBM's New Supercomputer

supercomputer

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.