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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    IBM computer will have power of 2 million laptops

    SAN FRANCISCO
    Tue Feb 3, 2009 8:36am EST
    An IBM supercomputer in an undated photo. Seven months after IBM delivered the world's fastest supercomputer, it has announced an even speedier one with the computing power of 2 million laptops. REUTERS/IBM/Handout

    SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Seven months after IBM delivered the world's fastest supercomputer, it has announced an even speedier one with the computing power of 2 million laptops.

    France

    IBM said on Tuesday it is developing the technology for its new Sequoia computer, with delivery scheduled in 2011 to the Department of Energy for use at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

    Sequoia will chug along at 20 petaflops per second and is one order of magnitude quicker than its predecessor. The earlier machine, delivered in June to the Energy Department, broke the 1 petaflop barrier.

    Peta is a term for quadrillion and FLOP stands for floating point operations per second.

    Sequoia, and a smaller computer called Dawn, are being built in Rochester, Minnesota, for use in simulating nuclear tests. IBM says they can also be used for complex tasks like weather forecasting or oil exploration.

    IBM says Sequoia will be highly energy-efficient for the job it does but even so will occupy 96 refrigerator-sized racks in an area the size of a big house -- 3,422 square feet (318 square meters).

    (Reporting by David Lawsky, Editing by Sandra Maler)
    France


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