Last year, IBM introduced the first ever petaflop supercomputer. Well the company has been hard at work since than and has been developing even speedier machine that will be 20 times faster than the one petaflop (1,000 trillion calculations per second) Roadrunner supercomputer. According to IBM, the upcoming supercomputer will have computing power of 2 million laptops.
The new supercomputer will be called “Sequoia”. IBM will delivery the beast in 2011 to Department of Energy for use at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Along with Sequoia supercomputer, IBM will also delivery smaller computer called Dawn around the same time frame. Both supercomputers are designed to work together on nuclear tests, weather forecasting and oil exploration.
IBM says that even though the Sequoia will be 20 times faster than Roadrunner, it will be more energy efficient. The supercomputer will require 3,422 square feet space and 96 refrigerated racks. IBM didn’t announce how much the Sequoia supercomputer will cost, but generally a top of the line supercomputer can cost few hundred million dollars.
[Via Reuters]