A supercomputer with the processing power of two million laptops is to be built by IBM for the US government to help manage its nuclear arsenal.

IBM announced it was developing the technology for its "Sequoia" system, which will be easily the fastest computer on the planet, with delivery to the Department of Energy (DOE) scheduled in 2011.

According to IBM, Sequoia will be able to achieve performance speeds of up to 20 petaflops or 20,000 trillion calculations a second. IBM estimates that the computing power of the Sequoia system will be greater than that of every one of the current systems on the Top 500 supercomputer rankings combined.

The system will be housed at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The system will contain more than 1.6 million microprocessors, placed in a series of 96 refrigerator-sized racks. The supercomputer will be contained in a 3,422 sq ft building – the size of a large house.

As microprocessors have become much smaller and more powerful, they have also become more energy efficient. Sequoia will use only about 6 megawatts of energy a year – the equivalent to the power consumed by 500 American homes a year.

Before IBM builds the Sequoia supercomputer, the company's engineers will begin work on "Dawn," a supercomputer which is designed to deliver 500 teraflops or 500 trillion calculations per second. Dawn will act as the delivery system for Sequoia's computing operations.

Both systems will be constructed at IBM's BlueGene facilities in Minnesota.

If completed as planned the Sequoia supercomputer will smash the record IBM set with its Roadrunner system which went online last year. The $100 million system, which is installed at the DOE's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, has a peak performance of 1.105 petaflops.

The main purpose of the Sequoia program is to run complex computer simulations for nuclear weapons research. It will allow nuclear scientists to determine whether weapons are safe and will work as required under the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration stockpile stewardship program.

"The problem we have with the nuclear stockpile is similar to one you might have at home with a car you've kept in the garage for 20 to 30 years," Mark Seager, assistant department head for advanced technology at Lawrence Livermore, told PC World.

"How do you carefully maintain the car as it ages so that when you go to start the car, you can be very confident it will start? That the probability that it won't start is less than 1 in a million? That's a pretty high level of certitude."

IBM said that Sequoia would also be used for research into astronomy, energy, the human genome and climate change. The system will allow forecasters to predict local weather events that are less than one kilometre across, it said, compared to 10 kilometres today.

The second fastest computer on the planet at the moment is the Cray XT Jaguar supercomputer, which is located at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. While IBM and Cray dominate the list of most powerful systems, Hewlett-Packard builds more systems in the Top 500 list than any other vendor with 209 entries.

The list is compiled by researchers at the University of Mannheim in Germany, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Centre at the Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee.

The United States dominates the Top 500 list and the Top 10. Nine out of the top 10 systems in the latest list issued in November are in the United States, and seven of those supercomputers belong to the DOE. The only top 10 system outside the US is the Dawning 5000A, which is located at the Shanghai Supercomputer Centre in China.

BY THE NUMBERS

Twenty petaflops of computing power is the equivalent to 3 million computations for every human on the planet per second.

It would take 120 billion people – almost 20 times as many people as there are on Earth – using calculators nearly 50 years to process what Sequoia could achieve in a single day.

Sequoia's price tag has not been disclosed but is likely to be well over $100 million.

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming