IBM and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have signed a new contract to build the next generation of IBM’s BlueGene supercomputers in 2012. Its “Sequoia” system will offer 20 petaflops of performance — nearly 20 times faster than the current fastest supercomputer, the 1.105 petaflop/s IBM Roadrunner.

The DOE is planning to use Sequoia and another new (500 teraflops) system called “Dawn” to connect the compute power of its laboratories at Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore. The Sequoia supercomputer will use 1.6 petabytes of memory.

The announcement precisely matches Ray Kurzweil’s forecast in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near that “supercomputers will achieve my more conservative estimate of 10¹⁶ cps [computations per second] for functional human-brain emulation by early in the next decade.” (20 petaflops is 2*10¹⁶ cps.) – Ed.