IBM's Sequoia Supercomputer is Now the World's Fastest Computing Machine

he latest TOP500 supercomputer rankings, released today, place America's 16-plus-petaflop machine at the top.
The latest TOP500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers is out this morning, and America is (finally) back on top. After nearly three years trailing supercomputers abroad--Japan’s K computer reigned supreme for most of last year, with China’s Tianhe-1A close behind--the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has stolen the top spot via Sequoia, a 16.32 petaflops (that’s a quadrillion

The Department of Energy's Sequoia Supercomputer NNSA

 

floating point operations per second) IBM machine built from 96 racks containing 98,304 computing nodes and 1.6 million cores.

Simulated Brain Ramps Up To Include 100 Trillion Synapses

IBM is developing a cognitive computing program under a DARPA program and just hit a major high.

Neurosynaptic Cores This network of neurosynaptic cores is derived from wiring in the monkey brain. The cores are clustered into regions, also inspired by the brain, and each core is represented by a point along the ring. Arcs connect the different cores to each other. Each core contains 256 neurons, 1024 axons, and 256×1024 synapses. IBM

The Sequoia supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recently crowned world champion of supercomputers, just simulated 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections among them--the most powerful brain simulation ever. IBM and LLNL built an unprecedented 2.084 billion neurosynaptic cores, which are an IBM-designed computer architecture that is designed to work like a brain.