U.S. Takes Back Supercomputing Crown

The U.S., once again, is home to the world’s most powerful supercomputer after being kicked off the list by China two years ago and then again by Japan last year.

The top computer, an IBM system at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is capable of 16.32 sustained petaflops, according to the Top 500 list, a global, twice a year ranking, released Monday.

This system, named Sequoia, has more than 1.57 million compute cores and relies on architecture and parallelism, and not Moore’s Law, to achieve its speeds.

“We’re at the point where the processors themselves aren’t really getting any faster,” said Michael Papka, Argonne National Laboratory deputy associate director for computing, environment and life sciences.

The Argonne lab installed a similar IBM system, which ranks third on the new Top 500 list. “Moore’s Law is generally slowing down and we’re doing it (getting faster speeds) by parallelism,” Papka said.

U.S. high performance computing technology dominates the world market. IBM systems claimed five of the top ten spots in the list, and 213 systems out the 500.

Hewlett-Packard is number two, with 141 systems on the list. Nearly 75% of the systems on this list run Intel processors, and 13% use AMD chips.

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