IBM’s Sequoia Crowned King of Supercomputers

The Sequoia supercomputer built by IBM is now considered the most powerful supercomputer on earth, according to rankings released today. 

The Sequoia supercomputer a system built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, is the now the most powerful supercomputer on earth, according to rankings released today. It led the top500.org list, which ranks the worlds supercomputers according to a standard software benchmark, delivering 16.32 petaflops (a thousand trillion [<?] floating point operations per second) using 1 572 864 processor cores. It marks the first time since November 2009 that a U.S. supercomputer has topped the charts.

The IBM machine made use of the company’s BlueGene/Q computing system, which features 18-core processors based on the PowerPC architecture. Overall, IBM systems had a good showing, accounting for 47.5 percent of the computing power in the top 500 list, easily outpacing it’s next nearest competitor Hewlett Packard.

Sequoia’s nearest competitor, Fujitsu’s K computer, has topped the charts during 2011. It managed 10.51 petaflops using 705 024 cores. It was followed by a U.S. system—the Mira supercomputer, another IBM machine, that pulled 8.1 petaflops with 786 432 cores.

European computers had a good showing, with two German machines and the first Italian top 10 system on the list, as well as France grabbing the number 9 spot with it’s homebrew Bull supercomputer.

Meanwhile, China’s Tianhe-1A took number five, and the Nebulae system, in Shenzhen, came in at number 10.

Sequoia - BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom

Site:	DOE/NNSA/LLNL
System URL:
Manufacturer:	IBM
Cores:	1572864
Power:	7890.00 kW
Memory:	1572864 GB
Interconnect:	Custom
Operating System:	Linux

Configurations

List	Rank	System	Vendor	Total Cores	Rmax (TFlops)	Rpeak (TFlops)	Power (kW)
06/2012	1	BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom	IBM	1572864	16324.8	20132.7	7890.00
11/2011	17	BlueGene/Q, Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz, Custom	IBM	65536	690.2	838.9	340.50