Jan. 12 -- The first four racks of NNSA’s Sequoia supercomputer have arrived at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sequoia, a 20 petaflops (quadrillion floating operations per second) system based on Blue Gene technology, will help continue to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear deterrent. Sequoia will also help maintain U.S. leadership in high performance computing, promote scientific discovery and advance President Obama’s nuclear security agenda.
Deliveries of the system will continue through April 2012. Integration will take place in phases with final acceptance of the 96-rack system scheduled for September 2012.
By fall Sequoia is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world and will be approximately twice as fast as today's most powerful system. To put this into perspective, 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.
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Source: NCSA Office of Public Affairs
