IBM’s Ambition: 20X Performance Leap

by Nathaniel Ed on February 3rd, 2009 at 6:48 pm EDT - 471 views

Seven months ago IBM created the most powerful supercomputer. Now IBM seeks to create an even more powerful computer; one that has the computing power of two million laptops.

You heard me right. Two million laptops. Equal to 20 petaflops. Much larger than the supercomputer that they build last year, which was the first computer to break the one petaflop barrier, pulling in at 1.105 petaflops.

They have codenamed it the Sequoia computer, and they schedule it to finish in 2011 for use at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, being built for the purpose of simulating nuclear tests. IBM says that it can also be used for weather forecasting or oil exploration. It will take up the same space as 96 refrigerator-sized racks in an area of 3422 square feet.

In case you don’t know, peta means quadrillion, and FLOP means “floating point operations per second (don’t ask me why it’s not FPOPS).”

I personally think that this is amazing. It’s hard for me to believe how computers are getting much better all the time. The internet we know now came out less than twenty years ago, and twenty years ago we were still using Ataris. It amazes me how far technology has gotten in twenty short years.

Sources: PC Magazine, Reuters
Image courtesy of Reuters.