The modern-day jet engine may be powerful enough to shuttle
travellers across a continent in just six hours but it’s also
unbearably loud—for both the ground crews that work around them
and residents within earshot of airports. And while aircraft
engineers are developing quieter designs, building and testing
these hushed prototypes can run into the six figures. But with
the help of the US Livermore National Labs’ supercomputer and
some open-source modelling software, commercial airliners may
soon be whisper quiet. The 3,000 square-foot Sequoia IBM
Bluegene/Q supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore (CA) National
Laboratories is among the most powerful parallel computing
systems on the planet. It sports over 1.5 million embedded
processors 1.6 PB of memory and crunches numbers at a staggering
16.32 PFLOPS. The Sequoia’s cores are arranged in a 5D Torus
design wherein each core is directly connected to ten others.
This greatly reduces latency even with cores two and three
connections away. Read/Write functions are h