NNSA awards IBM Contract to Build Next Generation Supercomputer

The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced a contract with IBM to bring world-leading supercomputing systems to its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to help continue to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s aging nuclear deterrent on February 3, 2009.

IBM will deliver two systems: Sequoia, a 20 PetaFLOPS system based on future Blue Gene technology, to be delivered starting in 2011 and deployed in 2012; and an initial delivery system called Dawn, a 500 TeraFLOPS Blue Gene/P system, scheduled for delivery in the first quarter of 2009. Dawn will lay the applications foundation for multi-PetaFLOPS computing on Sequoia.

Sequoia’s delivery and deployment schedule seems to be similar to Next Generation Supercomputer R&D Projec of Japant which completes delivery by March, 2012 (End of FY2011). Hence both supercomputer projects will compete in performance and delivery/deployment schedule each other.

Sequoia will have 1.6 Petabytes of memory, 96 racks, 98,304 compute nodes, and 1.6 million cores. It means that we will enter 1 million core system era soon. I cannot expect what happens in application code point of view.

Anyway, the House Democratic leadership has released an official stimulus summary on January 15 and it looks great. After that, Senate deal protects much of NSF Increase in Stimulus and there are a lot of gaps between both budget plans as shown in Computing Research Policy (CRA) blog. We need to watch progress of U.S. Stimulus plan in HPC view against current economic crisis for a while.

U.S. has been mainly driving HPC from the beginning. It may, thereby, be not surprized even if anything unexpected happens in HPC due to the crisis.