IBM is building the world’s faster supercomputer for the Department of Energy. The machine will have more computing power than the world’s current 500 fastest machines put together.

The machine will be dubbed Sequoai, taken from the Latin name for the Californian redwood. It will have a 1.6TB of memory and be housed in 96 racks, each the size of a refrigerator.

The current world’s faster computer, also made by IBM and used at the DOE, is known as Roadrunner. It was the first to break the one petaflop barrier, meaning it can carry out a quadrillion (one million billion) calculations per second. Sequoai is scheduled to shatter this mark by working at 20 petaflops.

The primary use of Sequoai will be to simulate nuclear weapons testing to check the United States’ stockpile without having to blow anything up. The machine may later be used for tasks such as producing much more accurate weather forecasts, particularly in predicting the behavior of extreme events such as tornadoes.

IBM will first produce a machine called Dawn which will run at 500 teraflops (in other words, one-fortieth the speed of Sequoai) to help researchers prepare for using the larger machine when it’s delivered in 2011.

Naturally IBM is very happy to get the inevitably huge funding for this project (though the amount is currently undisclosed), but the firm insists the government spending has benefits beyond the computer itself. Herb Schultz, the firm’s manager of deep computing, says the project will help overcome the obstacles of expanding computer systems to work on ever-larger scales, and that these solutions will benefit computing as a whole.

Those of a cynical nature may be wondering how such a mammoth machine fits in with a department in charge of energy matters. But IBM says that – in context – it will be energy efficient, drawing around 6 megawatts, roughly equivalent to the electricity used by 500 homes.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 3:05 pm under Science and technology, Technology.

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