IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer has claimed the title of “world’s fastest supercomputer” a title that has not been held by a US tech firm since 2009.
Sequoia was able to beat out Japan’s K Computer after it closed an amazing 16.32 petaflop calculations per second. To put that speed into perspective the computer processes 16 quadrillion calculations per second. If humans were to complete the same calculations it would take every single person on earth 320 years while working non-stop with calculators to complete the same calculations and likely one person would mess something up on year 319 and we would have to start all over again.
The massive supercomputer requires 96 racks the size of refrigerators and it is houses at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The supercomputer featured 93,304 compute nodes while operating 1.6 million cores with 1.6 petabytes of memory.
The Sequoia supercomputer has also been praised for its green energy consumption, using just 7.9 megawatts to operate compared to the 12. megawatts used by the K computer.
Not only is the supercomputer really fast, it will be used by the Department of Energy to run simulations designed to help extend the life of aging nuclear weapons. Essentially the supercomputer could eliminate the need to run underground nuclear tests by creating massively accurate calculations based on various systems testing.
You probably won’t be buying an IBM based Sequoia supercomputer for your living room anytime soon but at the same time could you image how awesome an MMORPG would be on this massive hulk of a processing device.
