IBM AGAIN

IBM is climbing back to the top of the big iron heap.
On Tuesday, the computing giant announced a deal to sell a new supercomputer--one that it says will be the most powerful in the world--to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) boasts that its so-called Sequoia system will be capable of crunching numbers 20 times faster than IBM's last record-breaker and 15 times faster than the current fastest machine.

IBM has promised the DOE that the computer, part of its Blue Gene series and scheduled for delivery in 2011, will be capable of 20 petaflops, or 20 quadrillion floating operations per second. That's the equivalent of completing calculations in around eight hours that would take a typical Intel-powered (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ) laptop 20,000 years--or, by IBM's count, the ability to finish in one hour a series of computations that would require the entire population of the planet, armed with pocket calculators, 320 years to complete.
Like its predecessor, the one-petaflop Road Runner supercomputer, Sequoia will be offered for general use to the scientific community for several months before it's put to use modeling the deterioration of America's nuclear weapons stockpile. The DOE will house the computer in its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.
The Sequoia announcement is IBM's answer to Cray's Jaguar supercomputer, which last November challenged IBM's lead in the supercomputing race using clusters of Advanced Micro Devices (nyse: AMD - news - people ) chips to achieve processing speeds of 1.6 petaflops, 60% faster than the IBM Road Runner supercomputer that broke the so-called "petaflop barrier" in June.
But Sequoia will do more than leap-frog Jaguar, says IDC analyst Earl Joseph. He argues that Sequoia could vastly outpace Moore's Law and set a new standard for supercomputing for years to come, much as Japanese company NEC's (nasdaq: NIPNY - news - people ) Earth Simulator remained the top-ranked supercomputer for much of the earlier part of the decade.
"This has created a bar much higher than we all expected," Joseph says. "If they had said 20 petaflops by 2015, that wouldn't have been a surprise. By 2011? That’s a real eye-opener."


Article by: http://www.forbes.com/