Score another one for IBM’s supercomputing aspirations. The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Tuesday announced a contract with IBM to bring supercomputing systems to its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
With the two new systems, IBM technology will play a role in continuing to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s aging nuclear deterrent.
“The longstanding partnership of NNSA, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and IBM is ushering in an era of multi-petaFLOPS computing,” said NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino. “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 endeavor will also help maintain U.S. leadership in high-performance computing and promote scientific discovery.”
A 20-PetaFLOPS Supercomputer
IBM will deliver two systems. The first, called Dawn, a 500-teraFLOPS (trillion floating operations per second) BlueGene/P system, is scheduled for delivery in the first quarter. Dawn will lay the applications foundation for multi-petaFLOPS computing on Sequoia, the second system.
Sequoia, a 20-petaFLOPS (quadrillion floating operations per second) system based on future BlueGene technology, will be delivered starting in 2011 and deployed in 2012.
With a speed of 20 petaFLOPS, Sequoia is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world and will be approximately more than 10 times faster than today’s most powerful system. IBM puts it into perspective this way: If each of the 6.7 billion people on Earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to do what Sequoia will do in one hour.
Strengthening Predictive Simulation
Sequoia will have 1.6 petabytes of memory, 96 racks, 98,304 compute nodes, and 1.6 million cores. Though orders of magnitude more powerful than such predecessor systems as ASC Purple and BlueGene/L,…