IBM is poised to construct the world's fastest supercomputer, according to a New York Times article .
According to the paper, documents mistakenly published on a US government website revealed plans for a new $400 million supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.
The world's fastest computer
The new machine will reportedly be able to crunch data at petaflop speeds, i.e. a whopping 1,000 teraflops. This equates to one thousand trillion floating point operations per second, writes the NY Times.
When built, the new IBM supercomputer will be around three times as fast as the world's current fastest supercomputer, BlueGene/L . This supercomputer is installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where it takes up 2,500 square feet of space.
Also built by IBM, BlueGene/L has a peak speed of 360 teraflops and tops the recently published Top 500 Supercomputing list.
Petaflop performance
The proposed "super" supercomputer will be almost ten times speedier than the No.2-rated supercomputer, the Jaguar (Cray XT4/XT3) based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Eight of the top ten supercomputers are based in the United States. The top European computer is based in Barcelona, Spain. This IBM JS21 cluster is a baby in comparison, however, with only 64 teraflops-worth of muscle.
Read more about IBM's BlueGene/L and the future of supercomputing here .
