An enhanced high-end supercomputer ordered by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will aim for 20-petaflop performance--almost twice the performance of today's top supercomputer.


Today's fastest supercomputer, with peak performance in the 10-petaflop range, will be bested by twofold when IBM's Blue Gene/Q supercomputer becomes fully operational in 2012 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The 20-petaflop Sequoia Blue Gene/Q supercomputer will be used to simulate nuclear weapons performance, decode gene sequences, analyze oil exploration readings and predict the path of hurricanes. Sequoia will also be the leading candidate for again winning the green supercomputer crown next year—it already won the Green500 in 2011—by cranking out 2G flops per watt.

The Sequoia Blue Gene/Q will be composed of more than 1.6 million processor cores and 1.6 petabytes of memory in 96 racks, covering an area of 3,000 square feet and drawing 6 megawatts of power.

The Blue Gene supercomputer architecture, now in its third generation, can be scaled up to 100 petaflops by merely adding new racks of processors. Using IBM's PowerPC A2 processor architecture—each of which includes 16 cores—supercomputers are built up from cascading 100-teraflop processor planes, each of which houses 8,192 cores. Special hardware speeds parallel processing tasks, such as speculative execution using transactional memory that stores intermediate results in order to permit easy backtracking to redo work dependent on the outcomes from other parallel threads.


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