IBM Building Energy-Efficient 20 Petaflop Computer

February 3rd, 2009 by Ariel Schwartz

I have to admit, this news makes me drool a little bit. The US government agreed today to buy two supercomputers from IBM— including one that will scale to 20 petaflops. That’s 10 times the performance of today’s most powerful systems. The Sequoia system will be 15 times faster than BlueGene/P, but will have the same carbon footprint and only a small increase in power consumption.

You may recall that Argonne National Laboratory’s BlueGene/P, which makes 350 million calculations a second per watt, is the second most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world.

The Sequoia system will use 45nm processors with up to 16 cores per chip, and will have 1.6 petabytes of memory feeding its 1.6 million cores. IBM and DOE engineers will begin work on Sequoia in 2011, with an expected completion date sometime in 2012.

Photo Credit: Argonne National Laboratory









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