IBM's Sequoia: 20x faster than the world's fastest supercomputer

Roadrunner? Pfff, your chart-topping 1.105 petaflops are laughable. IBM just announced its 20-freaking-petaflop Sequoia supercomputer due for delivery by 2012. While supercomputer speeds have steadily increased year-over-year, a near 20x jump in calculations per second since the last world ranking is unheard of, even if the system has yet to come on-line. Slated to spend its life simulating nuclear explosions, Sequoia will use 45-nm (PowerPC, presumably) processors with 16 cores per chip for as many as 4,096 processors per rack. That's a total of 1.6 million cores assisted by 1.6 petabytes of memory. Perhaps all this processing power might help IBM understand the futility of its Lotus Notes strategy.

[Chris Bell Posted Feb 3rd 2009 7:25PM]

This is what it takes to run Lotus Notes at a decent speed.

/Unlucky Notes 7 user.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 9th 2009 5:48PM]

"Slated to spend its life simulating nuclear explosions" Damn. Being a civilian I don't really see the point in that. There are a lot of other things this thing can do that are better than simulating nuclear explosions I'm sure.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 3rd 2009 11:01PM]

There are important things, and there are urgent things. And then there are urgent and important things. I guess the reason Sequoia will be used for checking out the health of the US' nuclear arsenal is simply prioritization. First things first..you can simulate weather and global warming and cancer drugs etc., but what use if you can't defend your civilization from a nuclear attack..It's like you were worried about the condition of the pipes in your house while the roof is on fire.

[(Unverified) Posted Feb 4th 2009 4:54AM]

They must still be trying to determine just how large of a nuclear explosion it will take to actually kill Cher's career. Apparently the supercomputers they're using can't model something powerful enough.

It'll be interested to see if Folding@home surpasses 20 pFLOPS by that time.

[Rebel6381 Posted Feb 4th 2009 11:30AM]

There are two types of people who say Lotus Notes sucks.

1. Those who don't use it to its full potential. It's not just email!!! http://www.cio.com/article/469913/_Things_IT_Managers_Should_Know_About_Lotus_Notes?page=1

2. Those who have never used it and should seriously STFU until they have.

[rohanh Posted Feb 4th 2009 7:55PM]

Engadget - shame on you for not doing the math.

2012, assuming it could be a December 31st online-date, is 4 years away (minus a month)

If the trend in supercomputer speeds is a doubling every year, then:
1.105 x (2^4) = 17.7 petaflops.

So we should EXPECT a nearly 18 petaflop computer by the end of 2012.

They're claiming they'll have a 20 petaflop computer. Big difference? No. About 10% faster than where we'd expect to be by then. Considering that the claim is being made 4 years ahead of time, that 10% could vanish. Even if it doesn't, it's hardly anything to write home (or on a blog) about.