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:and just for old time's sake...

[Anonymous Coward]

While you are joking about games (like Quake and Crysis), this computer does sound like a giant graphics card.

It can do 20 Pflops with 1.6 million processors, so 12.5Gflops per processor, but with 1.6TB of memory, it means its only got 1Mb per processor.

So it sounds like some kind of giant specialised GPU with local memory.

MTBF

[vlm]

So the real question in an immense cluster like this, is whats the MTBF?

Simon claims that the Eniac MTBF was 8 hours, although I've seen all kinds of claims on the web from minutes to days.

http://zzsimonb.blogspot.com/2006/06/mtbf-mean-time-between-failure.html

I would guess this beast will never be 100% operational at any moment of its existence.

I'm guessing the "cool" part of this won't be the bottomless pile of hardware in one room, but how they maintain this beast. Just working around one of the million CPU fans burning out is no big deal, but how do you deal with a higher level problem like one of the hundreds of network switches failing, etc?