Green Options

I have to admit, this news makes me drool a little bit. The US government agreed today to buy two supercomputers from IBM— including one that will scale to 20 petaflops. That’s 10 times the performance of today’s most powerful systems. The Sequoia system will be 15 times faster than BlueGene/P, but will have the same carbon footprint and only a small increase in power consumption.

Argonne National Laboratory’s new Blue Gene/P high-performance computer runs at an awe-inspiring 557 teraflops (557 trillion calculations per second) and can wow the green crowd with its energy efficiency. The computer uses only 1 MW of power— about a third as much electricity as a conventionally built supercomputer of comparable size.