flickering pictures

* = may not actually happen

If someone told you that IBM and the U.S. government were building the world’s most powerful supercomputer — one that could perform a staggering 20 quadrillion calculations per second — what would you think its purpose was? If you guessed curing cancer, studying climate change or running Vista smoothly — or anything other than a virtual test site for making bigger, badder nukes — you’d be wrong.

Codenamed “Sequoia,” this beast will whir into existence in 2012, and will be 12 times faster than the world’s current fastest computer, proving yet again that our relentless thirst for technology is motivated mostly by a desire for new and exciting ways to blow things up.

The number “20 quadrillion,” by the way, is a 20 followed by 15 zeroes — as soon as scientists manage to tack on three more, they’ll have reached something similar to the computing power of the human brain.

The computer’s specs, via Wired:

• 3,400 square feet
• 1.6 million processing cores
• 1.6 petabytes of memory
• 96 racks
• 98,304 computing nodes
• Uses 6 megawatts of power a year

Thanks, Rogan!
Story via Sanctuary at Discount.
Image via God3’s Blog

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