The NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) has announced that their supercomputer, dubbed Sequoia, is now ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the world.
The IBM-created Sequoia is a 96-rack Blue Gene/Q system that has managed 16.32 petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), a speed that has pushed the supercomputer into the front ranking of the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Sequoia is used for the NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program which oversees nuclear stockpiles in the States.
General Manager of IBM Power Systems Colin Parris said, “With supercomputers capable of 16 sustained petaflops, our ability to affect strategic change in areas like life sciences, public safety, energy and transportation that make our world smarter is greater than ever. The improvements in affordability, performance, efficiency and size that Sequoia delivers will also enable a broader set of commercial customers to implement HPC for their competitive advantage.”
Sequoia is water-cooled for the most part and is made up of “…96 racks; 98,304 compute nodes; 1.6 million cores; and 1.6 petabytes of memory.”
Source: Ars Technica