IBM Sequoia
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|
| Operators | LLNL |
|---|---|
| Location |
Livermore, California, United States |
| Power | 7.9 MW |
| Operating system |
CNK operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
| Space | 3,000 square feet (280 m2) |
| Memory | 1.5 PiB |
| Speed | 16.32 PFLOPS |
| Cost | $??? |
| Purpose | Nuclear weapons, astronomy, energy, human genome, and climate change |
IBM Sequoia is a petascale Blue Gene/Q supercomputer constructed by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program (ASC). It was delivered to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2011 and was fully deployed in June 2012.
On June 14, 2012, the TOP500 Project Committee announced that Sequoia replaced the K computer as the world's fastest supercomputer, with a LINPACK performance of 16.32 petaflops, 55% faster than the K computer's 10.51 petaflops, having 123% more cores than the K computer's 705,024 cores. Sequoia is also more energy efficient, as it consumes 7.9 MW, 37% less than the K computer's 12.6 MW.
As of June 17, 2013, Sequoia had dropped to #3 on the TOP500 ranking, behind Tianhe-2 and Titan. In June 2016, it slipped again, to fourth place on the TOP500 ranking.
Record-breaking science applications have been run on Sequoia, the first to cross 10 petaflops of sustained performance. The cosmology simulation framework HACC achieved almost 14 petaflops with a 3.6 trillion particle benchmark run, while the Cardioid code, which models the electrophysiology of the human heart, achieved nearly 12 petaflops with a near real-time simulation.
The entire supercomputer runs on Linux, with CNK running on over 98,000 nodes, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on 768 I/O nodes that are connected to the Lustre filesystem.
IBM built a prototype, called "Dawn," capable of 500 teraflops, using the Blue Gene/P design, to evaluate the Sequoia design. This system was delivered in April 2009 and entered the Top500 list at 9th place in June 2009.
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