An IBM supercomputer developed for US government
nuclear simulations and to study climate change and the human genome has
been recognized as the world's fastest.
The announcement Monday at the 2012
International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany recognized
Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at the Department of
Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The machine delivered an impressive 16.32 petaflops -- a petaflop equating to a thousand trillion operations -- per second.
Sequoia is primarily for simulations used to
ensure the safety and reliability of US nuclear weapons. It also is used
for research into astronomy, energy, human genome science and climate
change.
Sequoia dethrones Fujitsu's 'K Computer'
installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science
(AICS) in Kobe, Japan, which dropped to the number two spot at 10.51
petaflops per second.
A new Mira supercomputer which is also part
of the IBM BlueGene/Q series at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois,
was third fastest.
The most powerful system in Europe and number
four on the List is SuperMUC, an IBM iDataplex system installed at
Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Germany.
China, which briefly took the top spot in November 2010, has two systems in the top 10.
The announcement came from the TOP500 list
compiled by the University of Mannheim, Germany; the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee.
© 2012 AFP
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© 2012 AFP
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