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Breaking stories
Supercomputer for nuclear simulations becomes world’s fastest
An IBM supercomputer developed for US government nuclear simulations, and to study climate change and the human genome has been recognised as the world’s fastest.
The announcement at the 2012 International Super-computing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, recognised 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.
The supercomputer is actually a highly interconnected cluster of 1,572,864 processors, or cores, mounted on 98,304 “compute nodes”, or boards, that are arranged on a series of 96 standing racks across 318sq m of floor space.
Sequoia is primarily for simulations used to ensure the safety and reliability of US nuclear weapons. It is also used for research into astronomy, energy, human genome science, and climate change.
The supercomputer “will provide a more complete understanding of weapons’ performance, notably hydrodynamics and properties of materials at extreme pressures and temperatures”, said Thomas D’Agostino of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
“Computing platforms like Sequoia help the United States keep its nuclear stockpile safe, secure and effective without the need for underground testing,” he said.
“While Sequoia may be the fastest, the underlying computing capabilities it provides give us increased confidence in the nation’s nuclear deterrent as the weapons’ stockpile changes under treaty agreements, a critical part of President Obama’s nuclear security agenda.”
Sequoia dethrones Fujitsu’s K Computer which is installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, which dropped to second place with a performance power of 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 Nov 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.
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