SEQUOIA SUPERCOMPUTER, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Researchers from IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California with Sequoia, the LLNL system that was named the most powerful supercomputer in the world Monday in the top 500 list. (Photo: IBM via Flickr). The new Top 500 champion is Sequoia, a Blue Gene/Q supercomputer built on IBM Power architecture at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Californa. The emergence of Sequoia has returned the U.S. to the top spot of the Top500 list for the first time since November 2009. Sequoia consists of 96 racks; 98,304 compute nodes, 1.6 million cores and 1.6 petabytes of memory, and hit an impressive new record of 16.32 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark. The National Nuclear Security Administration uses Sequoia to research the safety, security and reliability of the United States’ nuclear deterrent – replacing the need for underground testing. The Blue Gene/Q Sequoia is eight times more powerful than its predecessor BlueGene/L technology.