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Biggest computer of the world for US nuke depart
BOSTON: The US government has commissioned IBM to create a massive supercomputer that will have 1.6 million processor cores and be 15 times faster than today's most powerful machine.
The Sequoia supercomputer is scheduled for operation in 2012 and will be able to perform at 20 petaflops, or 20,000 trillion floating point operations per second, IBM said. The fastest supercomputer today, Roadrunner, also built by IBM, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, can manage 1.1 petaflops.
The cost of the system has not been disclosed, but is likely to run into hundreds of millions of dollars, analysts said.
IBM is building two supercomputers under the contract. The first one, to be delivered by mid-year, is called Dawn and will operate at around 500 teraflops. It will be used by researchers to help prepare for the larger system.
Sequoia will be based on the Blue Gene/Q IBM supercomputer, which is still under development. It will use approximately 1.6 million processing cores, all IBM Power chips, running Linux, which dominates high performance computing at this scale.
IBM is still developing a 45 nanometer chip for the system and may produce something with eight or 16 cores - or more - for it. Although the final chip configuration has yet to be determined, the system will have 1.6TB of memory and be housed in 96 "refrigerator-sized" racks.
Ordered by the US Department of Energy, it will be located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and used primarily to manage the US's aging stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Those weapons contain highly corrosive and radioactive materials and Sequoia will allow scientists to perform simulations to help determine whether the weapons are stable and safe, and if they will work properly if the government should decide to use them.
ARY OneWorld Leading News Portal of Pakistan (Urdu - English), Watch Live ARY News
BOSTON: The US government has commissioned IBM to create a massive supercomputer that will have 1.6 million processor cores and be 15 times faster than today's most powerful machine.
The Sequoia supercomputer is scheduled for operation in 2012 and will be able to perform at 20 petaflops, or 20,000 trillion floating point operations per second, IBM said. The fastest supercomputer today, Roadrunner, also built by IBM, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, can manage 1.1 petaflops.
The cost of the system has not been disclosed, but is likely to run into hundreds of millions of dollars, analysts said.
IBM is building two supercomputers under the contract. The first one, to be delivered by mid-year, is called Dawn and will operate at around 500 teraflops. It will be used by researchers to help prepare for the larger system.
Sequoia will be based on the Blue Gene/Q IBM supercomputer, which is still under development. It will use approximately 1.6 million processing cores, all IBM Power chips, running Linux, which dominates high performance computing at this scale.
IBM is still developing a 45 nanometer chip for the system and may produce something with eight or 16 cores - or more - for it. Although the final chip configuration has yet to be determined, the system will have 1.6TB of memory and be housed in 96 "refrigerator-sized" racks.
Ordered by the US Department of Energy, it will be located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and used primarily to manage the US's aging stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Those weapons contain highly corrosive and radioactive materials and Sequoia will allow scientists to perform simulations to help determine whether the weapons are stable and safe, and if they will work properly if the government should decide to use them.
ARY OneWorld Leading News Portal of Pakistan (Urdu - English), Watch Live ARY News
