US Reclaims Top Supercomputer Spot with 'Sequoia'

[Rob Williams]

Not content to sit in second place for too long, the US along with IBM have worked hard to re-secure the top spot on the top 500 fastest supercomputer list. It's name: Sequoia. It's performance: about +50% faster than Japan's K computer, which now sits in the #2 spot. According to David Turek, IBM's VP of Exascale Computing, Sequoia's planning spans back two years - and a definite goal was to reclaim that top spot.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[madmat]

Bet it's still 90% Chinese...

 

[Rob Williams]

Bet it's still 90% Chinese...

Hah! The thing I find odd is that component lists aren't even made available. I -assume- that it's all Intel Xeon being used in there, which is as American as it gets (in terms of where it's designed and for the most part produced).

 

[madmat]

Xeon or Itanium. The rest would be produced overseas. As far as I'm aware there are no motherboards produced here or memory either.

Strike that, it uses IBM chips.

 

[Rob Williams]

I am not familiar with IBM's chips at all, but that might explain the reason Sequoia has 1.5 million processor cores for 16-20 PFLOPS when it took just 150,000 Xeon cores for the IBM SuperMUC to hit 3 PFLOPS.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

It's IBM, so PowerPC. The exact details are "Power BQC 16C 1.60 GHz" - which is a 16-core Power A2 processor clocked at 1.6GHz instead of 2.3GHz. Some of the technical details about the BlueGene/Q series can be found here. There is more than one BlueGene/Q, the Sequoia just so happens to be the fastest. In addition, it uses a custom interconnect instead of Ethernet (open) or Infiniband (Intel), but IBM's own 5D Torus, which is an Optical 40Gbps interconnect - trying to get details on that is a little tricky though.