IBM to send blazing fast supercomputer to Energy Dept.

This story has been edited since it was published. See below for details.

IBM plans to announce on Tuesday that it will supply the world's fastest supercomputer to the U.S. Department of Energy in the next few years, according to numerous reports.

Not only will the machine, called Sequoia, be the fastest supercomputer to date, it will blow the current record-holder out of the water. IBM's Roadrunner, located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, was the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (a petaflop is equal to a quadrillion calculations per second; the "flops" stands for floating point operations per second). But only seven months after the Roadrunner took top honors on a twice-yearly list of the world's fastest supercomputers, IBM is announcing that its successor will outdo it by an order of magnitude. Sequoia will be able to work at a staggering 20 petaflops, the equivalent of the computing power of 2 million laptops according to Reuters.

IBM says it plans to deliver the Sequoia to the Energy Department for use at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The supercomputer will run simulations to test the soundness of the nation's stockpile of nuclear weaponry, according to the IDG News Service.

Editor's note: When it was initially published, this story cited data from another publication about Sequoia's energy usage. Several readers doubted the validity of the data, and I have not been able to confirm the figures. For now, that information has been removed.

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