IBM has won a contract to build a supercomputer, called Sequoia, for the DOE’s NNSA.  It is estimated to be installed and brought online in 2011 and 2012.  It will have 1.6 million cores (from potentially 16-core chips) within 96 racks (in about 3,400 sq. ft.).  It will have around 1.6 Petabytes of memory and achieve about 20 Petaflops.  It will require about 6 million watts of power to operate, which is around 3.3 billion operations per second per watt–very impressive.  I wonder if that includes the power needed for the cooling system.  And is that when the processors are at 100% or when the system is idle?

At 1.6 PB of memory for 1.6 million cores, that is a relatively low amount of memory per core.  If the memory is doubled, for example, the system may require a few more megawatts of power.  This is based off of very rough estimates of power needed per GB of memory based off of some recent commodity clusters.  Do you have any hard numbers on power per GB of memory today?  Any information on the type of memory that might be used in Sequoia?

For more information, see IBM to send blazing fast supercomputer to Energy Dept. and/or U.S. taps IBM for 20 petaflops computer.