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.