IBM Now Has The World's Fastest Supercomputer

The IBM Sequoia system. (Credit: IBM)

Last year, Fujitsu’s K Computer took the crown as the world’s fastest supercomputer by demonstrating it could perform at 8.162 petaflop/s – which is 8.162 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. That was nearly four times faster than the Chinese Tianhe-1A, which took the number two slot. In November, Fujitsu reported that the K computer had become the first supercomputer to break the 10 petaflop/s barrier.

But it’s already only second place.

In fact, IBM supercomputers comprise 4 out of the top 10 fastest supercomputers on the current list, and 213 out of the top 500 supercomputers. You can read the whole list here.Today, the International Supercomputing Conference will announce that IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer is the fastest supercomputer in the world. It’s LINPACK benchmark rating is 16.32 petaflop/s. That’s 55% faster than the Fujitsu K computer, which benchmarked at 10.51 petaflop/s. Taking the number 3 spot is another IBM computer, the Mira supercomputer, an IBM BlueGene/Q system at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, which benchmarked at 8.15 petaflop/s.

In addition to being 55% faster than the K Computer, the IBM Sequoia also has the distinction of being 150% more energy efficient. Which is impressive when you consider that has 1,572,864 CPU cores. (By way of comparison, I’m writing this article on a computer with 4 cores.)

Last year, I made the mistake of predicting that the K Computer would be on top for a long while. This year, I shall make no such predictions. The increase in computing speeds in supercomputers is incredible. Last year’s second fastest supercomputer nearly doubled its performance and still fell to the number five slot on the list.