The "Sequoia" supercomputer is scheduled for operation in 2012 and will be able to perform at 20 petaflops, or 20,000 trillion [T] floating point operations per second, IBM said. The , IBM's Roadrunner at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, can manage 1.1 petaflops.

Sequoia will be based on IBM's Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, which is still under development. Ordered by the U.S. Department of Energy, it will be located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and used primarily to manage the U.S.'s aging stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Those weapons contain highly corrosive and radioactive materials and Sequoia will allow scientists to perform simulations to help determine whether the weapons are stable and safe, and if they will work properly if the government should decide to use them.

"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," said Mark Seager, assistant department head for advanced technology at Lawrence Livermore. "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."

The scientists have been working on the problem for several years with IBM's supercomputer, but they need a more powerful system to explore areas of physics they have not yet tackled and calculate the margin of error for results, Seager said.