IBM Building 20 Petaflop Computer For the US Gov't

eldavojohn writes "When it's built, 'Sequoia' will outshine every super computer on the top 500 list today. The specs on this 96 rack beast are a bit hard to comprehend as it consists of 1.6 million processors and some 1.6TB of memory. That's 1.6 million processors — not cores. Its purpose? Primarily to keep track of nuclear waste & simulate explosions of nuclear munitions, but also for research into astronomy, energy, the human genome, and climate change. Hopefully the government uses this magnificent tool wisely when it gets it in 2012."

Comments

Re:1.6M Processors, but only 1.6 TB memory?

[Professeur Shadoko]

My bet is that this is a typo.
1.6 PB seems more reasonable.

Re:1.6M Processors, but only 1.6 TB memory?

[rubycodez]

it is indeed 1.6 petabytes: http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000489

Re:1.6M Processors, but only 1.6 TB memory?

[Madball]

Another reference article: http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213000489 Mentions "up to" 4,096 processors per rack. So, at maximum, this would be 393,216 processors. Perhaps they are quad cores and someone took the liberty of multiplying the 393,216x4=1.6M (rounded). A more reasonable assumption may be 100,000 quad-core CPUs (400,000 cores). That would make the summarization of by only 16 times, lol.