Posted on 02/04/2009 8:30:12 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
BM is building the world’s faster supercomputer for the Department of Energy. The machine will have more computing power than the world’s current 500 fastest machines put together.
The machine will be dubbed Sequoai, taken from the Latin name for the Californian redwood. It will have a 1.6TB of memory and be housed in 96 racks, each the size of a refrigerator.
The current world’s faster computer, also made by IBM and used at the DoE, is known as Roadrunner. It was the first to break the one petaflop barrier, meaning it can carry out a quadrillion (one million billion) calculations per second. Sequoai is scheduled to shatter this mark by working at 20 petaflops.
The primary use of Sequoai will be to simulate nuclear weapons testing to check the United States’ stockpile without having to blow anything up. The machine may later be used for tasks such as producing much more accurate weather forecasts, particularly in predicting the behaviour of extreme events such as tornadoes.
IBM will first produce a machine called Dawn which will run at 500 teraflops (in other words, one-fortieth the speed of Sequoai) to help researchers prepare for using the larger machine when it’s delivered in 2011.
(Excerpt) Read more at tech.blorge.com ...
And it's a big-a$$ wheel. Considering the leverage advantage of a big wheel, they were thinking about putting a lot of torque on something. Maybe it was attached to cables which lifted the old black and white TV hanging on the wall?
Somewhere in the FR Archives I recall a thread where there was much discussion on that picture...I think it turned out to be a control panel at a power Generating Facility...but someone prettied it up and made a story out of it....at least that is what I recall.
I remember the article in the October, 1973 issue of Scientific American in which I first read of Moore's Law. I projected that by 2000 I would be able to afford the mainframe computer I was then using at work!And that it would be small enough to sit on my desk!
Sure enough . . .
Thanks.
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