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IBM Building Next Generation of BlueGene Supercomputers

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By Scott Ferguson, eWeek.com

IBM and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have signed a new contract to build the next generation of IBM’s BlueGene supercomputers at the famed DOE facility. The first IBM BlueGene supercomputer, called “Dawn,” will have a top processing speed of 500 teraflops. The second IBM system, dubbed “Sequoia,” will offer 20 petaflops of performance and surpass the records Big Blue set when it installed the massive Roadrunner system for the DOE in 2008.

[Read the full story here.]

Comments

Anonymous said…
Nice shiny toy. Pity no one will be left to run or use it.
2/04/2009 4:29 PM
Anonymous said…
NIF will use it, I'm sure. Soon that's all that will be left anyway.
2/04/2009 6:35 PM
Anonymous said…
The "flop foot race" is a waste of money.
2/04/2009 6:50 PM
Anonymous said…
Thr proper unit is flop*m^2.

Whether it's a waste of money is debatable.

One thing is certain, LC will accept the machine whether it works right or not. Managers like MS and DE have their egos to preserve and any issues with performance or reliability will be papered over.

Meanwhile pity the staff who'll be working some mighty long hours trying to get this cluster up and decently usuable.
2/06/2009 8:17 AM
Anonymous said…
It impresses (some of the)
public and more importantly
the Congressional staffers who
visit. I hope they don't
get carried away with
the glossy floors again.
Talk about safety.
2/07/2009 8:45 PM
Anonymous said…
For all of you who are hoping for a resumption of testing can relax. Testing is over for good. Simulation has been and will be the way things are done.
2/08/2009 7:38 AM
Anonymous said…
Given that we aren't designing anything new and all the old stuff was designed using computers whose equivalent capability you could now order from HP (recently caught selling hardware to Iran), why do we need to anything new at all?

All that controversy back in the Wen Ho Lee days suggested the bomb codes may now be in foreign hands. If all you need is simulations, then there is really no need at all for DOE to keep pretending they are safeguarding the arsenal.

All it would take for a country like Iran to develop a weapon would be a couple racks of server nodes. How hard would a machine room be to hide from IAEA inspectors? Are they even looking for such?
2/09/2009 12:37 PM
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