Image caption The IBM team behind the world's fastest computer. 
 
 IBM's Sequoia has taken the top spot on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers for the US. 
 
 The newly installed system trumped Japan's K Computer made by Fujitsu which fell to second place. 
 
 It is the first time the US can claim pole position since it was beaten by China two years ago. 
 
 Sequoia will be used to carry out simulations to help extend the life of aging nuclear weapons, avoiding the need for real-world underground tests. 
 
 It is installed at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. 
 
 "While Sequoia may be the fastest, the underlying computing capabilities it provides give us increased confidence in the nation's nuclear deterrent," said National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) administrator Thomas D'Agostino. 
 
 "Sequoia also represents continued American leadership in high performance computing." 
 
 Adding processors 
 
 The computers were ranked according to a test known as the Linpack Benchmark which gives each computer a petaflop/s score (quadrillion floating-point operations per second). 
 
 Sequoia tested at 16.32 petaflop/s, compared to K Computer's 10.51 petaflop/s. 
 
 To make the figure more understandable, IBM said Sequoia was capable of calculating in one hour what otherwise would have taken 6.7 billion people using hand calculators 320 years to complete if they had worked non-stop. 
 
 Although the US's efforts helped secure it the lead, its overall tally of three computers in the top 10 was worse than six months ago when it had five. 
 
 China and Germany both have two supercomputers, while Japan, France and Italy have one. 
 
 But IBM proved to be the leading manufacturer claiming five out of the top 10 spots. 
 
 David Turek, vice president of deep computing at the firm, told the BBC his company had been preparing to retake the top spot for two years. 
 
 "Substantial planning went into this. We knew the day would come." 
 
 Sequoia is 1.55 times faster than the Fujitsu model, and uses over 1.5 million processor cores. 
 
 In comparison the Japanese model has less than half the number of CPUs (central processing units). 
 
 Energy efficient 
 
 The IBM supercomputer is also more energy efficient than the Fujitsu model. 
 
 Sequoia consumes 7.9 megawatts compared to the K computer which uses 12.6 megawatts. 
 
 Mr Turek described Sequoia as the "pinnacle of energy efficiency" and said the reaction had been "very enthusiastic." 
 
 "Government laboratories in Europe have already expressed interest," he said. 
 
 Image caption CM-5/1024 designed by Thinking Machines was the first supercomputer on the list. 
 
 The list is published every six months by German Professor Hans Meuer and US-based Professor Jack Dongarra. 
 
 Prof Dongarra told the BBC it was unlikely that another manufacturer would overtake IBM in the next year. 
 
 "Sequoia is very impressive," he said. 
 
 273,930 times faster 
 
 The first computer to take the top position on the list was the CM-5/1024 in 1993, designed by Thinking Machines. 
 
 According to Prof Dongarra, Sequoia is 273,930 times faster. 
 
 "A calculation that took three full days to compute on the Thinking Machines in 1993 today can be done in less than one second on the Sequoia," he said. ||||| Show full PR text 
 
 NNSA's Sequoia Supercomputer Ranked as World's Fastest 
 
 Supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab passes 16 petaflops 
 
 WASHINGTON, D.C. – The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced that a supercomputer called Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was ranked the world's most powerful computing system. 
 
 Clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), Sequoia earned the number one ranking on the industry standard Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers released Monday, June 18, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC12) in Hamburg, Germany. Sequoia was built for NNSA by IBM. 
 
 A 96-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q system, Sequoia will enable simulations that explore phenomena at a level of detail never before possible. Sequoia is dedicated to NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program for stewardship of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, a joint effort from LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. 
 
 "Computing platforms like Sequoia help the United States keep its nuclear stockpile safe, secure, and effective without the need for underground testing," said NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino. "While Sequoia may be the fastest, the underlying computing capabilities it provides give us increased confidence in the nation's nuclear deterrent as the weapons stockpile changes under treaty agreements, a critical part of President Obama's nuclear security agenda. Sequoia also represents continued American leadership in high performance computing, key to the technology innovation that drives high-quality jobs and economic prosperity." 
 
 "Sequoia will provide a more complete understanding of weapons performance, notably hydrodynamics and properties of materials at extreme pressures and temperatures. In particular, the system will enable suites of highly resolved uncertainty quantification calculations to support the effort to extend the life of aging weapons systems; what we call a life extension program (LEP)," said Bob Meisner, NNSA director of the ASC program. 
 
 Uncertainty quantification, or "UQ," is the quantitative characterization and reduction of uncertainty in computer applications through running very large suites of calculations to characterize the effects of minor differences in the systems. Sources of uncertainty are rife in the natural sciences and engineering. UQ uses statistical methods to determine likely outcomes. 
 
 The machine will be an important tool used to support stockpile life extension programs, including the B61 and the W78. By reducing the time required for these studies, total costs are also reduced. In addition, the machine is expected to enhance NNSA's ability to sustain the stockpile by resolving any significant findings in weapons systems, bringing greater power to the annual assessment of the stockpile, and anticipating and avoiding future problems that inevitably result from aging. All of this helps to ensure that the nation will never have to return to nuclear explosive testing. 
 
 Supercomputers such as Sequoia have allowed the U.S. to have confidence in its nuclear weapons stockpile over the 20 years since nuclear testing ended in 1992. The insight that comes from supercomputing simulations is also vital to addressing nonproliferation and counterterrorism issues as well as informing other national security decisions such as nuclear weapon policy and treaty agreements. 
 
 "Sequoia is an exciting achievement for the POWER architecture, not just for its speed and energy efficiency, but also for the important and complex work it can support to safeguard the nation's nuclear stockpile," said Colin Parris, General Manager IBM Power Systems. "With supercomputers capable of 16 sustained petaflops, our ability to affect strategic change in areas like life sciences, public safety, energy and transportation that make our world smarter is greater than ever. The improvements in affordability, performance, efficiency and size that Sequoia delivers will also enable a broader set of commercial customers to implement HPC for their competitive advantage." 
 
 The NNSA/LLNL/IBM partnership has produced six HPC systems that have been ranked among the world's most powerful computers including: The Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Blue Pacific; ASCI White; the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Purple; Blue Gene/L; Blue Gene/P; and Blue Gene/Q, Sequoia. ASCI White, Blue Gene/L and now Sequoia all attained a number one ranking on the Top500 list. 
 
 Sequoia is primarily water cooled and consists of 96 racks; 98,304 compute nodes; 1.6 million cores; and 1.6 petabytes of memory. Though orders of magnitude more powerful than such predecessor systems as ASC Purple and Blue Gene/L, Sequoia will be roughly 90 times more power efficient than Purple and about eight times more than BG/L relative to the peak speeds of these systems. ||||| Genevieve Martin/Oak Ridge National Laboratory 
 
 Making a world-class supercomputer with thousands of processors and the power appetite of a small town isn't as easy as it used to be. 
 
 But IBM's latest machine, called Summit, is a big step forward for those who need gargantuan computing power. Unveiled Friday at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, it's a top contender for fastest of the fast, a crown that will be bestowed later this month by organizers of the Top500 supercomputer list. For now, though, Big Blue stops a little short of calling it the world's fastest machine by that measurement. 
 
 Now playing: Watch this: Summit is the world's most powerful supercomputer 
 
 Instead, Summit is "the most powerful, smartest supercomputer in the world," said Dave Turek, vice president of high-performance computing and cognitive systems at IBM. It'll crunch through something like 200 quadrillion mathematical calculations each second, a speed called 200 petaflops. That as fast as each of the planet's 7.6 billion people doing 26 million calculations per second on a hand calculator. 
 
 The system and its twin at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California were funded in 2014 as part of a $325 million Department of Energy program called Coral, but Summit took years to develop. Goosing supercomputer speeds has been tough this decade as increases in processor speed began tailing off. 
 
 It's got a high price tag, but Summit shows what it takes to stay at the cutting edge of computing. The US lags China today for both the top supercomputer and the most total supercomputer capacity on the Top500 list, but Summit will deliver a speed boost with new processor designs, fast storage and internal communications, and a design that can use artificial intelligence methods to zero in on the right computing calculations to be running in the first place. 
 
 Supercomputing meets AI 
 
 "The marketplace is beginning to recognize that AI and high-performance computing are not separate domains but things that need be viewed as integrated," Turek said. "The incorporation of machine learning dramatically reduces the amount of simulation that needs to be done to get to optimal results." 
 
 What's Summit good for? At Oak Ridge, it'll be scientific research into subjects like designing chemical formula, exploring new materials, studying links between cancer and genes on a very large scale, investigating fusion energy, researching the universe through astrophysics and simulating the earth's changing climate. 
 
 Lawrence Livermore, a lab funded chiefly by DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, has a more militaristic mission, including stockpiling stewardship research to ensure nuclear weapons reliability. 
 
 Oak Ridge National Laboratory 
 
 Summit supercomputer is big 
 
 Summit divides work among 4,608 interconnected computer nodes housed in refrigerator-sized cabinets and liquid-cooled by pumping 4,000 gallons of water per minute through the system. 
 
 It takes up an eighth of an acre -- the size of two tennis courts. Its peak energy consumption is about 15 megawatts, enough to power more than 7,000 homes. 
 
 Each node has two IBM Power9 chips running at 3.1GHz, and each of those has 22 processing cores that run in parallel. Connected to each pair of Power9 chips are six Nvidia Tesla V100 graphics chips. Nvidia rose to power selling graphics chips, but it's capitalized on the fact that those chips can be adapted for supercomputing and AI work, too -- especially the computationally intense training phase in which AI systems learn to detect patterns from real-world data. 
 
 Each node has 1.6 terabytes of memory, too, a design that keeps data handy for fast access when needed by a processor. Data produced by calculations can be saved at a whopping 2.2 terabytes per second on a 250-petabyte storage system. 
 
 If those numbers leave you flummoxed, that's 100 times the memory of a high-end laptop and about 1,000 times the storage capacity. 
 
 Enlarge Image Top500 
 
 Measuring supercomputer performance 
 
 The Top500 list gauges performance with a single benchmark called Linpack; China's Sunway TaihuLight, at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, claims the top Linpack score of 93 petaflops. It's not bad, but for years supercomputer makers have made it clear it's not a full reflection of all the sorts of work a supercomputer needs to perform. 
 
 Indeed, Summit was designed for 30 different applications. 
 
 "There's got to be more than one figure of merit that characterizes value," Turek said. "You can put a huge number of servers together and conjure up a high Linpack score, but to get them to scale on real applications is a real art." 
 
 One candidate for expanding beyond Linpack is the High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG). 
 
 IBM has been building DOE supercomputers for decades, and Summit isn't the end of the lineage. Instead, it's a step toward a later goal of reaching an exascale system, one that can perform a quintillion calculations per second, about 5 times that of Summit. 
 
 Turek said he wasn't sure such a thing was possible when the Summit design began in 2014. Now he's confident it is, though Summit will be used to figure out exactly how. 
 
 "This is a signpost on the way to exascale, and we want to see what works and doesn't work," Turek said "We are absolutely convinced we can get to exascale." 
 
 Blockchain Decoded: CNET looks at the tech powering bitcoin -- and soon, too, a myriad of services that will change your life. 
 
 'Hello, humans': Google's Duplex could make Assistant the most lifelike AI yet.
– America can once again boast that it is home to the world's fastest supercomputer. IBM's Sequoia system knocked Japan's K Computer into second place after clocking in at a staggering 16.32 "petaflops"—that's 16 quadrillion calculations per second, reports the Wall Street Journal. The supercomputer—which takes up 96 racks, each bigger than a fridge, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California—can compute in one hour what it would take everybody in the world 320 years working non-stop using hand calculators to compute, the BBC notes. This is the first time an American computer has taken top spot since 2009, and Sequoia also won praise for energy efficiency: It consumes 7.9 megawatts compared to the K Computer's 12.6 megawatts. The Department of Energy will use Sequoia to run simulations designed to help extend the life of aging nuclear weapons, eliminating the need in these cases to run underground nuclear tests. Quips Engadget's Sean Buckley, "More computers, less explosions. We can't think of a better thing to do with 98,304 compute nodes, 1.6 million cores, and 1.6 petabytes of memory spread across 96 racks—can you?"