TOP500: For the first time since 2009, the United States has reclaimed the top spot on the list of TOP500 Supercomputers. The supercomputer, named Sequoia, is an IBM Blue Gene/Q system that is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Sequoia boasts 16.32 petaflops of computation power using 1,572,864 cores. The official announcement of the list came on Monday June 18, and Japan’s “K Computer” was bumped to the number two spot.
IBM and LLNL have also released the following video to summarize the importance of this development. Michel McCoy, Director of Advanced Simulation and Computation at LLNL, explains that innovations in energy efficiency enabled success on this project. Sequoia’s computational improvements will create “a qualitative difference in the kind of science that you can do and the kind of results that you can generate.” McCoy also argues that the pursuit of exascale computing will require DOE national laboratories “to work with American industry in order for us to tackle these problems systematically.”