A 20 petaflop* Supercomputer

The U.S. government has hired IBM to build a supercomputer with more power than all the supercomputers on theTop 500 supercomputer list combined.

Sequoia (what the supercomputer is called) will use approximately 1.6 million processing cores, all IBM Power chips, running Linux. The system will have 1.6TB of memory and be housed in 96 "refrigerator-size" racks. And the entire system is said to need 6megaWatts of power to run.

The fastest systems today can only reach 1 petaflop, a remarkable achievement in its own right that was met only last year.

see details here.

*petaflop is an acronym meaning FLoating point Operations Per Second. The FLOPS is a measure of aa computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating point calculations. similar to operations per second.