Fast Forward to 2012: IBM Breaks 20PF

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The US Department of Energy has just announced a program awarded to IBM that will birth a 20 Petaflop supercomputer by the year 2012.  Stop, rewind.  That’s correct, 20PF.  The system, named Sequoia, will be delivered as a part of the Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship program at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

It “is the biggest leap of computing capability ever delivered to the lab,” said Mark Seager, the assistant department head for advanced technology at LLNL.

IBM will actually break the delivery into two separate machines.  The first, Dawn, will be delivered by mid-year in a 500 TF flavor.  Its purpose is to assist researchers to prepare their codes for the upcoming behemoth.  Sequoia will lag Dawn by 2 1/2 years to the tune of 1.6 million cores of IBM Power.  The final chip configuration has yet to be determined, but the memory bar and footprint have been set at 1.6PB of main memory in 96 racks.

LLNL is not without its own work in the matter.  Sequoia is driving a major power upgrade to the computer facilities.  Their current 12.5 MW will be increased to 30.  Sequoia will chew an estimated 6 MW.

No buts about it, this is a huge machine.  For more info, read the full article here.

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Comments

  1. The 1.6TB must be a typo in the original article – surely they mean 1.6PB, right? That would be 1GB/core, as opposed to 1MB/core.