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

But can it play Crysis?

I would imagine either the CIA/NSA or the US DOD has better super computers that they just don't talk about.

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Can you carry it on or must it be che ked? :D

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DoE also does lot of classified work on nuclear weapons and used supercomputers. There is no apriori reason to assume that DoD/NSA/CIA have a monopoly on operating super computers.

I actually met Watson at IBM's research lab the other day.. very impressive.. We are getting a BGQ.. But only the third fastest..

China will leapfrog us again soon..

No assumptions here, just suggesting that the worlds fasted computers are not publicly announced.

I have no idea what hardware they use but you'd think that the stuff used in the AUSCANNZUKUS (ECHELON) system would be totally state of the art and at least as good as the stuff they DO talk about.

Doubtful; they have the budget to build a computer optimized for any given task, and wouldn't need a big general-purpose supercomputer. If they do, the DoE can sell them time.

For cracking encryption, getting an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) designed and built pays off if you're going to be buying them in volume. For other military tasks, there's going to be a requirement that they distribute them, and at that point you have to decide if it all has to be in the same building to count as a supercomputer or not. Facebook and Google certainly have more processing power, but they don't call the network spanning their datacenters a "supercomputer" for some reason.

No they don't have a better supercomputer.

National Nuclear Security Administration is using this computer for nuclear bomb simulations.

In addition to national security applications, Sequoia will also be put to use study climate change, astronomy and the human genome.

Sequoia

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Finite elements calculations for CFD, complex structures, weather, etc require lots of calculations. If you took a portion of the atmosphere 20 km above the surface of the earth and divided into a trillion cells for your calculations, each cell would be a sqaure, one seventh of a mile. Accuracy of the calculations depend om the grid size. You have to make the grids smaller for better accuracy. Eaxh cell will be governed by diffetential equations and boundary conditions. The computational effort goes up as cube of the number of cells. A trillion cells model requires at least ten raised to the power thirty six calculations. By contrast deciphering a 128 bit code requires ten to tje thirty three calculations, if you have absolutely no clue. This effort is a thousand times smaller than a atrillion cell grid. If you reduce the cell size to a litlle smaller than half the original size, you increase the number of cells to ten trillion cells and the compuyational effort to ten to the 39th power, already a million times the effort of brealing a 128 bit code blind.
Your claim does not appear to be based on any reasoning, just a belief arisiing from the awe and respect for these agencies and their need for secrecy.
I can only speak for and of what I know and can reason. Hollywood may create a different impression.

ok, but I bet it can't run windows 8 either.

-David

You got me. Come to think of it, it won't fit in my carry on either.

This post is a bit muddled...

Kinda "mixing your metaphors" here; 20km above the earth but each cell being 1/7th mile (area, I presume, hence square miles). That notwithstanding, the math doesn't work. The earth's radius is about 6380 km (on average), add 20 and we get around 6400. The surface area of such a sphere is about 514,718,540km. Divide by a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) and you get a cell that's around .0005 km in area. That's a cell about .0002 square miles, which is a whole lot less than 1/7th of a mile.

It's been a very long time since I last worked on GCMs but, in those days, the typical lat/lon resolution was around 2.5/2.75 degrees (or some such), which meant that each atmospheric level had about 90x72 cells. I think that nasa/noaa/ncar are looking at GCMs with grid resolutions of around 3-5km (but I've been away from that field for many, many years, so don't hold me to those numbers) which means that each level would contain about 20-50 million cells, nowhere near a trillion.

And why 20km? The difference in surface areas of a sphere 6380 vs 6400km is less than 1%.

What makes you think NSA is bothering with 128 bit encryption? Ask instead, for example, how much computing power you need to monitor a whole lot (ie, a nation's worth) of phone conversations (especially cell and sat) and apply word spotting software to pull out "interesting" conversations in real-time. If you think this isn't happening then I would suggest you go back and review the now public disclosures of Bush's (Bush the Lesser, not Bush the Elder) warrant-less wiretaps.

This comes off sounding a bit snide, like an ad hominem attack.

This is what I was talking about with the "Five Eyes"/AUSCANNZUKUS/ECHELON system. I'm no expert (in fact, VERY far from it) but I'd say the computing power required would have to be massive. Fair enough, it's a network not a supercomputer per se but it would still have to have incredible computing power.