IBM has unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, a machine that is almost 20 times more powerful than the previous record holder. The new system, dubbed Sequoia, will be able to achieve speeds of up to 20 Petaflops - 20 quadrillion calculations per second - the equivalent of more than 2m laptops and promises to be faster than every system on the Top500 supercomputer list, combined.
“If each of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to do what Sequoia will do in one hour.”
Sequoia will consist of around 1.6m computer chips, giving it the ability to perform an order of magnitude faster than the 1.1 Petaflop Blue Gene/L computer, which is currently recognized as the world's most powerful. It will be housed at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The computer will be used to run massive simulations to keep track of the health of the country's nuclear stock; moreover, meteorologists will use Sequoia to more accurately predict the weather, study the cosmos and the human genome.
