crapping rainbows in your brain

Boasting over 1.6 million processors and some 1.6TB of memory, the Sequoia system will initially be used to keep track of the US' mountain of aging nukes and simulating nuclear explosions, er, tests to determine whether the weapons are stable and safe (irony?!) for use. The number of cores the supercomputer will have is, as of yet, a closely guarded secret.

Sequioa should be up and running by early 2012, but in the meanwhile, IBM is already getting stuck in on its plans to begin deployment of Dawn, a 500-teraflop system which will eventually serve as the delivery system for Sequoia operations. Both systems will be constructed at IBM's BlueGene facilities in Minnesota.