IBM wins top spot on supercomputer list

IBM's supercomputer, Sequoia has taken the top spot on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers for the US. The system is installed at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and hit 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack benchmark using 1,572,864 cores. It's also one of the most energy efficient systems on the list.

"While Sequoia may be the fastest, the underlying computing capabilities it provides give us increased confidence in the nation's nuclear deterrent," said National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) administrator Thomas D'Agostino. "Sequoia also represents continued American leadership in high performance computing."

Fujitsu's K Computer, at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, now slides to second place with 10.51 Pflop/s using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores. It's held the number one spot for the last year. China has two systems in the Top 10, as well. With Tianhe-1A at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin at number five and Nebulae at the National Supercomputing Centre in tenth position.

Supercomputers are used to solve some of the toughest scientific problems, such as simulating nuclear explosions, forecasting long-term climate changes and mapping underground oil and gas deposits. Also, some longtime supercomputer makers, including Cray Inc. and Silicon Graphics International Corp., SGI have recently begun selling machines for so-called big-data problems, such as studying stock-trading patterns and user actions on the Web.

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