Following two years out in the cold after China taking the crown in November 2009 the US has finally reclaimed pole position in the race for the world's fastest supercomputer. 'Sequoia' as the new system is known is housed in the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and has been clocked at a phenomenal 16.32 petaflops/s (a petaflop is equivalent to a quadrillion floating point operations per second). The previous record holder was Fujitsu's K Computer in Japan, and Sequoia is approximately 1.55 times faster than this.
The Chinese computer that originally took the crown from the US is now ranked at only number five in the world which shows how fast things are moving in the normally relatively static arena of extreme supercomputing. Unsurprisingly all this incredible processing power is wanted by the US Nuclear Security Administration who intend on using it to simulate nuclear weapons tests.
The official world top ten as published by the University of Mannheim in Germany is as follows:
- U.S.A. - Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California
- Japan - K Computer at RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe
- U.S.A. - Mira at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois
- Germany - SuperMUC at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching
- China - Tianhe-1A at National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin
- U.S.A. - Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee
- Italy - Fermi at CINECA in Bologna
- Germany - JuQueen at Forschungszentrum Juelich in Julich
- France - Curie thin nodes at CEA/TGCC-GENCI in Bruyeres-le-Chatel
- China - Nebulae at National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen
Sequoia's reign mightn't last too long though however the future currently seems rosy for the US as Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee is reportedly getting ready to bring their 20 petaflops/s 'Titan' system online later this year.
