IBM Sequoia is fastest supercomputer in the world

The US has finally wrested the title of having the fastest supercomputer in the world after a short hiatus, with IBM’s Sequioa taking the plaudits in being declared to be the world’s fastest supercomputer. This particular supercomputer was named after the huge trees in America’s forest, and has been declared as top dog by the Top 500 Supercomputer list. Capable of achieving 16.32 sustained petaflops (quadrillion floating-point operations per second), IBM’s Sequoia certainly tears Fujitsu’s 10.51 petaflop K computer apart, making huge strides over the previous champion.

The Sequoia has IBM’s Blue Gene/Q architecture to help it achieve such phenomenal performance figures. In fact, in theory, one is able to scale it to deliver 100 petaflops worth of processing power. We do know that the Sequoia comprises of 98,304 compute nodes, all crammed into 1.6 million cores with 1.6 petabytes RAM.