But will it run Crysis in 3D, that my question.

This is one serious computer, so for how much electricity its going to use, who cares considering how much it cost, which will be in 10 of millions if older system are any indication, I think they will be able to pay the bill.

I am glad its going to be used for not only Nukes but other productive human endeavors, good to see people putting things like this to work that could lead to medical break-thru.

If they are going to use that to run the current climate models, that just means it will come to the wrong answer faster. A faster computer does not mean a more correct answer if the code is not corrected to come to a more correct solution...ya know.

Jeff

Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group. Seems like he used 'decimate' quite reasonably.

What I want to know is why they need to simulate nuclear explosions. We know how to make them, let's try not to.

Apparently they don't give a damn about the amount of electricity it will eat. Is there really a need for such supercomputers?

I hope the writer realizes that the word decimate means to destroy a tenth of something. If this is only going to "decimate" something, it's not that remarkable.

It's likely that they will use Cell Processors for this new supercomputer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)

96 racks, 1,600,000 processors = 16,666 processors per rack. Most racks are 42U in height, which gives us 396 processors per rack U.... even with Quad core processors this seems... optimistic!

Finally, we'll get to see real Terminators, centrally controlled roaming the Earth. Cool.

"Could this mean that there is some other hardware floating assist (like Cell) in the BlueGene/P?" There is a project of the same name in Stanford using an explicit hierarchical memory model and the Cell processors, among others..

Other news around the web mention 1.6 million CPU cores, and that Sequoia will be based on IBM's Power architecture. Currently Power6 processor runs at 5GHz, Power7 is expected to have at least 8 cores and run at a similar frequency...

Rather more than 'decimate', I say.

Yeah, that is a lame name. If it had been up to me, I'd call it Napalm. What do you mean, that's insensitive ? Hey, stop pushing ! Okay, I've got my coat already !

How is "Weather cock" a typo? What do you think it is supposed to be?

Ehmmm great computer, mayor typo: "Weather cock"

1.6 million core * 850 MHZ * 4 flops/cycle is only 5.44 PetaFlops , not 20 PetaFlops. Could this mean that there is some other hardware floating assist (like Cell) in the BlueGene/P?

sandy bridge is out in 2010 and will have around 200 GFLOPS per processor. why not put 1.6 million of these processors? 200x(1.6 million)gflops= 320 Pflops.

assuming 1GB of memory per processor, 1.6 million processors means 1.6PB of memory. and that's NOT huge when it comes to super computers. they normally have a few hundred TB's of RAM

Phil, are you sure that 1.6TB of memory isn't actually correct? I mean, every day machines (like my own) are only in the low GB of RAM (4GB myself), so 1.6TB of RAM would be HUGE. I wouldn't expect to see PB of RAM anytime soon, but for processing speed I would expect super computers to be in the petaflops.

1.6 Petabytes of memory?

...Imagine the resolution you could run Crysis in on this bad boy