IBM has announced a supercomputer with computing power of 2 million laptops, faster-and-speedier than its own supercomputer released just seven months ago.

On Tuesday, The Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced an agreement to build what IBM is suggesting will be the most powerful supercomputer system in the world.

The machine Sequoia, is slated to boot up in 2012 at Lawrence Livermore. Sequoia will include 1.6 million IBM Power processors housed in 96 racks the size of refrigerators, and occupy 3,422 square feet.

It will be a 20 petaflop per second system based on future BlueGene technology to be delivered in 2011 and deployed in 2012. It also will have 1.6 petabytes of memory and 96,304 compute nodes. The system will contain nearly 100,000 computing nodes and draw six megawatts of power a year, enough to power 500 homes.

The system will house nuclear weapon data as well as perform research on energy, genome, climate change, and astronomy. It will also greatly help weather forecasters as the system will have the ability to predict weather events less than one kilometer across.

The new supercomputer will live at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

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