The race to build the fastest computer in the world
never ends. Technology keeps improving, microchips keep getting smaller, and
processing power continues its exponential growth. But for now, the United
States can claim the title of owning the world's fastest computer. The
Department of Energy's "Sequoia" supercomputer in a federal lab in
California was named on Monday as the fastest processor in the world, giving
the U.S. a title it hasn't held since 2009.
The "Sequoia" - built using an IBM system - is
planned to be a 20-petaflop computer. It currently stands at sixteen petaflops,
enough to give it the crown of "world's fastest." Sixteen petaflops
is enough power to perform sixteen thousand trillion calculations per second.
The Department of Energy's website
breaks it down further: "Sequoia is expected to be one of the most
powerful supercomputers in the world, equivalent to the 6.7 billion people on
earth using hand calculators and working together on a calculation 24 hours per
day, 365 days a year, for 320 years...to do what Sequoia will do in one
hour."
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is
the home to Sequoia. The previous computer to be named "world's
fastest" was a Japanese computer called the "K computer."
Interestingly, not only is Sequoia more powerful than its Japanese rival, it is
far more energy efficient as well. The Department of Energy's new computer
consumes 7,890 kilowatts per hour, compared to 12,659 for the K computer.
The Sequoia itself doesn't look anything like a PC you might
have at home. 98,304 compute nodes and 1.6 million cores are stacked on 96
racks and cover 4,500 square feet. The supercomputer is designed to deal with
aging nuclear weapons. The machine is tasked with running complex simulations
aimed at extending the lifespan of America's nuclear arsenal.
The Sequoia was named the world's fastest by Top 500 Supercomputer
Sites, who do rankings of the fastest computers on Earth every six months.
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