Over the next few years, the supercomputer segment will include a brand new machine, able to provide more than 20 times the performances of the Petaflop system, which is able to do over 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

The new system, called Sequoia, was requested by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and should be completed by the year 2012. It will be installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

"The longstanding partnership of NNSA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and IBM is ushering in an era of multipetaflop/s computing," NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino said in a statement.

Sequoia will be based on IBM’s future BlueGene technology and its final version will include 1.6 million cores, 1.6 Petabytes of memory, 98,304 compute nodes and 96 racks; it will cover 3,422 square feet. According to IBM’s estimates, the supercomputer will be 160 times more power efficient than ASC Purple and also, on the same scale, 17 times better than BlueGene/L - both being previously installed supercomputers at LLNL. At this point, BlueGene/L is ranked as the world’s fourth fastest supercomputer, with two updates in 2007 and 2008.

Sequoia is expected to provide 40 times more power than today's technology for monitoring and forecasting weather and also a 50x improvement in scientists' ability to predict earthquakes and map out evacuation routes. The research could even reach a point when the predictions might point out which houses may be destroyed, bringing a significant help in the areas where such events occur periodically and also in many other places.