IBM will attempt to break its own record in petaflop/s by 2012, when it has promised to deliver a new supercomputer that will work approximately 20 times faster than its Roadrunner system. The 20 petaflops supercomputer, dubbed “Sequioa,” will be housed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, and will be used primarily in simulations of nuclear weapons.

 

By comparison, Roadrunner, the supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has a top performance of 1.105 petaflop/s, while the Jaguar supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (developed by Cray), posted a top performance of 1.059 petaflop/s. Both systems are operated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

 

The Sequoia system will include 1.6 million processor cores, 96 racks, and over 98,000 computing nodes. The supercomputer is part of an agreement between IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy on the next generation BlueGene systems that will go beyond any performance level we see today.

 

In addition to Sequoia, IBM will also introduce Dawn, a smaller supercomputer that will be delivered this year, with a performance of 500 teraflop/s. Dawn will also be used by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in nuclear simulations.

 

These simulations are only the beginning, and represent only a small fraction of what these supercomputers could provide. These systems could ultimately be used in more accurate predictions of weather phenomena, but also in creating climate change models or to predict earthquakes.

 

According to last year’s Top 500 Supercomputers, nine of the ten supercomputers of the world are located in the United States, seven of them being operated by the Department of Energy.

 

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory hosts the IBM BlueGene/L system, the fourth most powerful in the world. The most powerful system outside the United States, and the largest to be operated with Windows HPC 2008 operating system, is the Chinese Dawning 5000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center.