IBM builds on the computer.

IBM pushes on the accelerator Computer: The next supercomputer is everything so far seen in the shadows that his predecessor as cheap calculator can fade. But the project has its pitfalls. With the giant computer company enters the computer-uncharted territory.

 

Particularly long, it is still not ago that IBM introduced the computer world has been broken. In November last year it was time, the Road Runner, a 250-ton machine is at the top of the fastest computer, took over first place in the top 500 supercomputer list. But that was the 2008th Now IBM's engineers are already working on a mainframe, the Road Runner as a lame calculator can look.

Inconceivable 20 Petaflop / s computing power will be under the sequoia Sequoia machine reach, would thus be 20 times faster than Road Runner. As a reminder to all who are not regular so must employ large numbers: A flop / s is a floating-point calculations per second, a standard unit to estimate the computational power of computers. A Petaflop / s, however, are a trillion, trillion in 1000, therefore, such calculations, a number with 15 zeros. The Reuters news agency before expects that the capacity of two million commercial notebooks represents.

The fact that such an enormous capacity for payroll will be used should be clear. And it is also not just any insurance company or bank, but the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory IBM's contracting authority for the construction of Sequoia.

A corrosive Nuclear Arsenal

When the computer giant, as planned, 2012 will be completed, he should help the slow corrosive to U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal to manage. It will however not be about numbers and inventory storage locations into a database.

Rather, the Sequoia scientists allow virtual insights into nuclear weapons to maintain their shelf date has long exceeded. Without the bombs and missiles to slice the machine must be the physical and chemical processes in the simulated explosive devices. In this way, hope the administrator of the nuclear arsenal to be able to better assess whether the intervention nor explosive devices are stable or slowly becoming a threat to their environment.

And of course, the researchers also want to get out on the warheads would still be usable, you should also try to decide for their use. An employee of the U.S. research organization compares the project in the "
PC World "by attempting a 30-year-old car ready to go to." How can we ensure that the car in any attempt immediately start, even though he is aging continues, "he describes the task.

The memory requirement is not estimated

So far the researchers have this problem with the ASC Purple supercomputer to solve. But this 230 million U.S. dollars expensive computer achieved 100 teraflops only meager / s. Too little, say the researchers, and point out that the error with this system is still far too high, some areas of physics so do not be ascertainable.

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But that is now directed Sequoia - and where is geklotzt not gekleckert. Probably tens of thousands of IBM's Power processors to be used for the computer in black steel cabinets, computer racks, locked. Total 96 large cabinets, the computer will fill more than 300 square meters of floor space consumed as operating system Linux. How much work and one mass storage system for the site is still completely open. The designers these values can not be estimated simply because they have never been such a huge machine built.

Six lean megawatts

Only this much is already certain: Compared with many other supercomputers Sequoia is almost trained to save energy. At approximately six megawatts of electricity will be estimates. That would be enough for around 500 U.S. households with energy supply and is twice as much as Roadrunner verheizt. Given the computing power have increased significantly but the ratio of computing power to energy intake from Sequoia significantly better than current super computers.

And if Sequoia is bored, because no rusting to simulate nuclear weapons are, he in his calculation rests far more useful things can devote. The weather forecast or the deciphering of gene sequences, for example, promises at least IBM. That would be a nice additional benefit - as long as nuclear simulation and climate forecasting is not to come.