US Leads TOP500 Once Again with 16 Petaflop Sequoia from IBM

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The United States has returned to a leading position on the TOP500 list with a new 16 Petaflop IBM BlueGene/Q supercomputer named Sequoia at LLNL. With 1,572,864 processing cores, Sequoia achieved an impressive 16.32 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark to become the fastest machine on the planet.

In the number 2 position, Fujitsu’s K Computer weighs in at 10.51 Petaflops using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores. The K Computer held the No. 1 spot on the previous two lists.

The new Mira supercomputer, an IBM BlueGene/Q system at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, debuted at No. 3, with 8.15 petaflop/s using 786,432 cores. The other U.S. system in the Top 10 is the upgraded Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which was the top U.S. system on the previous list and now clocks in at No. 6.

Coming in at number 4 on the list is SuperMUC at LRZ in Germany, an IBM IDataPlex cluster with innovative hot-water cooling. SuperMUC is now the fastest machine in Europe.

SuperMUC combines its hot-water cooling capability, which removes heat 4,000 times more efficiently than air, with 18,000 energy-efficient Intel Xeon processors. In addition to helping with scientific discovery, the integration of hot-water cooling and IBM application-oriented, dynamic systems management software, allows energy to be captured and reused to heat the buildings during the Winter on the sprawling Leibniz Supercomputing Centre campus, for savings of one million Euros ($1.25 million USD) per year.

Details on the rest of the TOP500 are still coming out here at ISC’12 in Hamburg, but I think it is worth noting that the TOP 20 systems on the list are all Petascale, a number that has doubled since November, 2011. Read the Full Story.