The US government is building a
supercomputer for its nuclear department that will be the most
powerful computer in the world.
The computer will be used by the Department of Energy's National
Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and will be ten times faster
than today's most powerful system.
Two systems will be built for the super-computer by
IBM. The first is Sequoia, a 20 petaFLOP/s (quadrillion
floating operations per second) system based on future BlueGene
technology. This will be delivered starting in 2011 and deployed in
2012. The second is an initial delivery system called Dawn, a 500
teraFLOP/s (trillion floating operations per second) BlueGene/P
system, being delivered in the first quarter of 2009. Dawn will lay
the applications foundation for multi-petaFLOP/s computing on
Sequoia.
To put the size of the computer into perspective, if each of the
6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked
together on a calculation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would
take 320 years to do what Sequoia will do in one hour.
NNSA administrator Thomas D'Agostino said, "These powerful
machines will provide NNSA with the capabilities needed to resolve
time-urgent and complex scientific problems, ensuring the viability
of the nation's nuclear deterrent into the future. This endeavour
will also help maintain US leadership in high performance computing
and promote scientific discovery."