IBM announces 20-petaflops supercomputer
November 18, 2011
Blue Gene/Q (credit: IBM)
IBM has announced the Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, with peak performance of 20 petaflops and 16 multi-processing core technology, marking it as one of the fastest supercomputers in the world and intended to solve the most challenging problems facing engineers and scientists.
Nicknamed “Sequoia,” Blue Gene/Q will be fully deployed in 2012 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), with a scalable peak performance up to 100 petaflops. It is expected to predict the path of hurricanes, analyze the ocean floor to discover oil, simulate nuclear weapons performance, and decode gene sequences.
Blue Gene/Q is also expected to become the world’s most power-efficient computer, churning out 2 gigaflops per watt.
Announced earlier in 2011, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) will also implement Blue Gene/Q to stoke economic growth and improve U.S. competitiveness for such challenges as designing electric car batteries, understanding climate change and exploring the evolution of the universe.
Comments (6)
by andmar74
It’s interesting that IBM seems to have a clear path to 100 petaflops. It’s not just about putting in more CPU’s, for example the bandwidth between memory and CPU’s must be large enough so that the CPU’s don’t have to wait.
If a 100 petaflops machine is built soon, there’s just a factor of 10 up to the exaflop machine :-)
by Giulio Prisco
The IBM announcement has 100 “a scalable peak performance up to 100 petaflops” and “When Blue Gene/Q is fully deployed in 2012 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the system, named “Sequoia”, is expected to achieve 20 petaflops at peak performance.” I think the specific LLNL instance will have a peak of 20 petaflops, and other instances may have even higher performance as Promethean says.
by scorpio13
20 pflops or 100 pflops its better than 8 pflops
by Promethean
I think “scalable peak performance” just means they can expand it to 100 PFLOPS in the future by adding more of the same nodes.
by Fievels
Nevermind
by Fievels
… *I think you mean peak performance of 20 petaflops. not 100