Components

IBM Builds the World’s Fastest Supercomputer to Help Take Care of Our Nukes

In case you missed it… According to Top 500, the United States can claim to have the world’s fastest supercomputer for the first time in three years.

IBM’s Sequoia has taken the title of the world's fastest supercomputer. The system is based on IBM’s BlueGene/Q-server technology, and it packs about 1,572,864 processor cores with 1.6 petabytes of memory. Physically speaking, the supercomputer takes up about 3422 square feet of space spread out into 96 refrigerator-sized server racks. All this power lets Sequoia perform 16.32 quadrillion calculations per second (16.32 petaFLOPS).

The previous record holder was Fujitsu’s K-supercomputer, which topped 10.51 petaFLOPS last year in November. That computer ran off of 705,000 processor cores and was housed at Japan’s Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe.

IBM built its Sequoia supercomputer for the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The National Nuclear Security Administration will use Sequoia to produce simulation tests and help maintain the country’s aging stockpile of nuclear weapons without the need for underground nuclear explosive testing.

That sounds impressive and all, but can it run Crysis?

[Top 500 and NNSA via The Verge and Gizmodo]