WORLD
U.S. Sequoia Supercomputer Tops Latest TOP500 List
Baku, June 18 (AZERTAC). A U.S. Sequoia Supercomputer took the first position in the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers for the first time since November 2009, TOP500 supercomputing site reported.
The Sequoia Supercomputer, installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved an impressive 16.32 petaflop/s using 1,572,864 cores.
Sequoia, one of the most energy efficient systems on the list, left behind Japan's "K Computer" with 10.51 Pflop/s, which was at the top in the last two ratings. The United States lost the lead position in November 2009 when China's Tianhe-1A occupied the first position.
Russia's Lomonosov supercomputer, installed in Moscow State University, with 0.9 Pflop/s ranked 22nd. Overall, there are five Russian supercomputers in the current rating, the same number as in the previous list.
The TOP500 table shows the 500 most powerful commercially available computer systems twice a year. Some experts often criticize the rating for the one-sidedness and inability to show the actual performance of systems in many classes of practical problems.
The computer is capable of calculating in one hour what otherwise would take 6.7 billion people using hand calculators 320 years to complete if they worked non-stop.
Although the US's efforts helped secure it the lead, its overall tally of three computers in the top 10 was worse than six months ago when it had five.
China and Germany both have two supercomputers, while Japan, France and Italy have one.
But IBM proved to be the leading manufacturer claiming five out of the top 10 spots.
David Turek, vice president of deep computing at the firm, told the BBC his company had been preparing to retake the top spot for two years.
"Substantial planning went into this. We knew the day would come."
Sequoia is 1.55 times faster than the Fujitsu model, and uses over 1.5 million processors.
In comparison the Japanese model has less than half the number of CPUs (central processing units).