Armonk, NY - 03 Feb 2009: The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has selected Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as the development site for two new supercomputers--Sequoia and Dawn—and IBM as the computer’s designer and builder. These systems will allow for smarter simulation and negate the need for real-world weapon testing.

Under terms of the contract, Sequoia will be based on future IBM BlueGene technology, exceed 20 petaflops (quadrillion floating operations per second) and will be delivered in 2011 with operational deployment in 2012. Dawn, an initial delivery system to lay the applications foundation for multi-petaflop computing, will be based on BlueGene/P technology, reach speeds of 500 teraflops (trillion floating operations per second) and is scheduled for operational deployment in early 2009.