IBM breaks computer speed record

BBC reports.

The newly installed system trumped Japan's K Computer, made by Fujitsu, which fell to second place.

It is the first time the US can claim pole position since it was beaten by China two years ago.

According to Huffington Post, the machine is capable of calculating in one hour what it would take 6.7 billion people around 320 years to manage with calculators. It is used at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California.

It will be used to help simulate what will happen to nuclear weapons as they age.

The machine is 1.55 times faster than Fujitsu's K Computer, which had headed the previous two lists.

The Sequoia is based on Big Blue's Blue Gene/Q architecture, which can theoretically scale to provide 100 petaflops worth of processing power, The Verge writes.

The NNSA's Sequoia consists of 98 304 compute nodes, into which IBM has packed 1.6 million cores with 1.6 petabytes of RAM (1GB per core). The system sits across 96 racks and is roughly eight times more power-efficient than IBM's Blue Gene/L architecture, which held the number one spot during the mid-2000s.