The Ultimate Gaming Machine you'll never have - IBM Sequoia

[Dohc-WP]

Sequoia is a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer being constructed by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). It was delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2011 and will be fully deployed in 2012.

When the plans for the IBM Sequoia were revealed in February 2009, the targeted performance of 20 petaflops was more than the combined performance of the top 500 supercomputers of the time. The 20 petaflops target will make Sequoia almost twice as fast as the current record-holding, 10.51 petaflops K computer and equal to the intended performance of the Cray Titan.

Sequoia will be of Blue Gene/Q design, building off previous Blue Gene designs. It will consist of 98,304 compute nodes comprising 1.6 million processor cores and 1.6 PB memory in 96 racks covering an area of about 3,000 square feet (280 m2). The processors are to be 16- or 8-core Power Architecture processors built on a 45 nm fabrication process.

The complete system will draw about 6 MW of power but is projected to have an unprecedented efficiency in performance per watt. The Sequoia design will perform 3000 Mflops/watt, about 7 times as efficient as the Blue Gene/P design it is replacing, and more than 3 times as efficient as the current Top 500 leader.

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[MOnk]

Disregarding the fact that 'regular' games wouldn't run on that, even if they did I'm not so sure it would really be all that awesome for gaming considering GPUs are purpose build to perform many common graphical operations in hardware, then factoring in the architecture and speed of individual pipelines, I don't see it as that clear cut an outcome.