King of Supercomputers
The Sequoia supercomputer is a system built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Liver-more National Laboratory, in California, is the now the most powerful supercomputer on earth, according to rankings released today. It led thetop500.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