Here Come the Petaflops

♫ Anything you can do,
I can do better.
I can do anything
Better than you…♫

Lyrics and music written by Irving Berlin, from Annie Get Your Gun.

The New York Times reported today that IBM is building the world’s mightiest supercomputer:

“I.B.M. remains intent on producing the biggest and baddest supercomputers on the planet.

In 2012, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will fire up an I.B.M. BlueGene machine expected to reach 20 petaflops of performance. That means the system – dubbed Sequoia – will handle a quadrillion mathematical operations per second and run about 10 times faster than today’s top supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was also built by I.B.M.”

While this machine will be used for military operations, there is thought as to how to put this computing power to work in the commercial sector:

“Researchers at I.B.M., however, have projects underway to explore running standard business software, instead of scientific code, on the BlueGene machines in the hopes of opening up the systems to new markets.”

I am sure that this announcement will spur on other manufacturers to adapt this type of technology to their computers. I have the expectation that this, and similar, technology can trickle down to the much more humble machines the likes of us get to use on a daily basis. Something even a few orders of magnitude under this speed demon might make today’s bloatware operating systems seem, well, zippy….