In the top 500 of the world’s fastest supercomputers, the IBM Sequoia at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in the forefront being caught. The rekenmonster, which will be used for nuclear simulations, know 16,32 petaflop to achieve.
The Sequoia, which in 2010 was first presented by IBM, consists of 96 racks. In the racks are a total of 98.304 nodes, which in total are good for 1.6 million 1.6 GHz geklokte hpc cores. The nodes communicate via 5D Torus, a proprietary fibre-optic ” technology from IBM, with a bandwidth of 40Gbps.
In determining the computing power of the Sequoia supercomputer is traditionally the Linpack benchmark run. After a trial run of 23 hours, the computing power at 16,32 petaflop. In theory, the system can even peaks at 20 petaflop, but the Sequoia is turned during the benchmarkronde with an efficiency of approximately 81 percent. With a score of 16 petaflop passes through the Sequoia is the Japanese K Computer from Fujitsu in the semi-annual top 500 list. This supercomputer has 705.024 cores and know the 10.5 petaflop to achieve.
With a power consumption of 7890kW the system is significantly more efficient than the K Computer, which 12.659 kW consumed. According to IBM, this is possible by an innovative water cooling system; along and on each node run thin copper tubes in which water is circulated. Traditional air cooling would be much more energy than the IBM used water cooling.
The Sequoia, which was purchased by the department of energy and $ 200 million would have cost, will mainly be used for running nuclear simulations. Through this simulations wants the American government, among others, can determine how long the existing nuclear arsenal is still deployed.
In the updated top 500 list, namely the European supercomputers of improving their position. The most powerful is the SuperMUC, an IBM iDataplex system in Germany is stationed and 2.8 petaflop is able to achieve. The Italian Cineca-system holds the seventh place, with 1.7 petaflop, while the also German rekenmonster JuQUEEN BlueGene/Q, with 1.4 petaflop, good for eighth place. Additionally, we find within the top 10 the French CEA/TGCC-Genci-rekenmonster, also with the 1.4 petaflop.