It has a processing power equivalent to 2 million laptops, and looks like a roomful of 96 refrigerators. Seven months after introducing the fastest supercomputer in the world, IBM has announced an even faster one. The company said it is developing technology for their new computer ‘Sequoia’ that will be delivered in 2011 to the United States Department of Energy for use in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

‘Sequoia’ will have an output of 20 petaflops/second (unit performance as a computer that performs operations per second), and would be a level above its predecessor. The previous machine, which was delivered in June to the Department of Energy, broke the 1 petaflop/s barrier. Peta is a term for quadrillion, and FLOPS stands for floating point operations per second, i.e. the tasks that a computer can perform in a second. ‘Sequoia’ and a smaller computer called ‘Dawn’ are manufactured in Rochester, Minnesota, for use in nuclear simulations.

IBM said it can also be used for complex tasks like weather prediction and oil exploration. The company adds that the new supercomputer will make efficient use of energy for the work they do, though it is still housed in 96 racks the size of a refrigerator each in a space the size of a large house of about 318 meters square.

Via the Inquirer