International Business Machines (IBM) is an American multinational technology and consulting firm headquartered in Armonk, New York. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology.
World’s fastest super computer will be undoubtedly IBM’s Sequoia . It is being built at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California by IBM.
This machine will nearly 20 times faster than the previous fastest record holder (BlueGene).
This new machine can achieve a speed of 20 Peta flops (Floating Point operations per second) or 20 quadrillion computations per second. The Sequoia wil have 1.6 million processor chips under the hood.
This super computer will play a critical role in nuclear weapons simulations, biological problem solving and genetic research.
The currently working fastest supercomputer is the BlueGene.
The supercomputer consists of 64 racks of Blue Gene servers, each of which contains 1,024 700MHz dual-core PowerPC processors.
Its specs are :
Specifications of BlueGene/L are listed on LLNL’s website are as follows:
1. 65,536 compute nodes, each targeted for 2.8 GFlop/s peak
2. Chip multiprocessor with 4MB L3 cache on chip
3. High-bandwidth low-latency 3D torus and combining tree networks
4. 32 terabytes of memory
5. High-performance kernel on compute nodes, Linux on I/O nodes
6. Hardware support for Message Passing Interface collectives
7. BlueGene/L currently tops the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list with a Linpack performance
8. benchmark of 280.6 TFlop/s.
