NASA's new supercomputer aims for 10 PFLOPS by 2012

SGI and Intel Corp. are teaming up to build a supercomputer for NASA that they expect will pass the PFLOPS barrier next year and hit 10 PFLOPS by 2012. A petaflop is a quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

Techs from SGI, a maker of high-performance computers, will begin installing the new supercomputer on May 21 and are slated to have it fully assembled in July. The machine, running quad-core Intel Xeon processors with a total of 20,480 cores, should initially hit 245 TFLOPS.

The machine will be installed at NASA's Advanced Supercomputing facility at the Ames Research Center at the Moffett Federal Airfield in California.

Read full story at ComputerWorld.