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DOE Pulse
  • Number 367  |
  • July 16, 2012

LLNL’s Sequoia fastest high performance computer

Sequoia – located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – is the world's fastest high performance computing system on the international ranking.

Sequoia – located at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory – is the world's fastest
high performance computing system on the
international ranking.

The Sequoia may be considered the largest tree in the world, but now the name Sequoia invokes a giant capability in high performance computing.

Sequoia – located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) – is the world's fastest high performance computing system on the international ranking, it was announced at the 2012  International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Hamburg, Germany in June.

Clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), Sequoia earned the number one ranking on the industry standard Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. This marks the first time since November 2009, a U.S. supercomputer tops the ranking. The Top500 is released twice a year in June and November.

A 96-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q system, Sequoia will enable simulations that explore phenomena at a level of detail never before possible. Sequoia is dedicated to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program for stewardship of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, a joint effort by Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories.

"The quantitative leap forward in computational power Sequoia represents will have a huge qualitative impact on the nuclear weapons calculations we will be able to conduct for stockpile stewardship,”  said Bruce Goodwin, principal associate director for LLNL’s Weapons and Complex Integration. "Sequoia also is a fine example of a national lab and industry working together to continue American leadership in HPC – leadership that is vital to the nation's defense and economic security."

Press Release. https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2012/Jun/NR-12-06-07.html

[Linda Lucchetti, 925.422.5815,
luchetti1@llnl.gov]