Packed with 1.6 million Power cores
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The big bad box that IBM sold to LLNL and is talking about today is nicknamed Sequoia, and it will be based on a "future Power technology" that IBM is not being specific about at this point. IBM is expected to deliver Sequoia in 2011, and it will pack 1.6 million processor cores, a more than tenfold increase over the Dawn machine that will deliver a fortyfold increase in performance to 20.13 petaflops.
The Sequoia machine, which will have 1.6 TB of main memory, will be housed in a mere 96 racks and take up 3,422 square feet of floor space - a little more than twice the size of the Dawn system. The Sequoia massively parallel machine will consume approximately 6.6 megawatts of juice, which is a lot for a single machine, but given that it will deliver 3,050 megaflops per watt - a nearly seven-fold increase in power efficiency over the Dawn system - the tradeoff seems to be worth it. Provided you have a data center that can handle 6.6 megawatts.
When the company I work for was located in Cambridge, MA there was an interesting company across the street called Thinking Machines Associates. I dropped by at lunch time to drop off my resume and fill out an appilication. I was told there were no openings and my resume was refused. I never gave it much thought after that until I saw the company named in Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy. It was an NSA front working on encryption supercomputers. No wonder they were open to the public.
Man makes a powerful computer that needs 3400 square feet, weighs tons, sucks 6.6 MW of power, and requires a massive cooling system. It’s outdated in 10-20 years and requires many people to maintain and fix it.
God makes a brain that can do it in less than a cubic foot, runs on miliwatts, has a compact 1-2 gallon cooling system, and in general is self-repairing.