IBM Building 20 Petaflop Computer For the US Gov't

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 3, 2009 @02:46AM from the because-the-nsa-hates-drm dept.

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."

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Re:and just for old time's sake... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-02-03 03:17 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.