IBM Sequoia Supercomputer to be the Fastest Ever

In the world of supercomputers, IBM is easily the number one manufacturer. Last year, we wrote about the RoadRunner supercomputer which topped the charts as the fastest machine available for scientific computation housed at the Los Alamos Laboratory and most notably running PetaVision a piece of software used to simulate the human visual cortex. A couple of days ago, IBM funded by the US department of energy announced that they are building a new supercomputer that will be more 15-20 times faster than any other supercomputer in use today. Sequoia is slated to become the new king among the list of the top 500 supercomputers in use today throughout the world. The new computer will be housed at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.


The supercomputer named Sequoia will go online in 2012; yes, it takes a long time to build these computers. As it is commonly done, Sequoia will be constructed using thousands of CPUs connected together and working collectively to solve large scientific problems. According to information scattered around the Web, Sequoia will have some 1.6 million processors and the computational capacity of 20 petaflops that is 20 quadrillion calculations per second. When finished, the computer will occupy 3,422 square feet of space and require 6 megawatts of energy to operate (this apparently is far less than what supercomputers require today when measured with respect to the number of calculations performed against the energy used.) The actual cost of the computer has not been disclosed.

The computer will be used run massive simulations to keep track of the health of the country's nuclear stock; moreover, meteorologists will use Sequoia to more accurately predict the weather (maybe for once we can get some accurate forecasts,) study the cosmos and the human genome.