Sequoia, a supercomputer built for NNSA, has been named the fastest in the world by Top500. Operating at 16.32 petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), Sequoia helps monitor the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile by simulating weapons performance in high detail. Simulating weapons performances permits NNSA to ensure the safety, reliability and effectiveness of our nuclear weapons without the use of nuclear explosive testing. The IBM BlueGene/Q system is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The semi-annual Top500 is an industry standard list that was released June 18 at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC12) in Hamburg, Germany. The last time a supercomputer from the United States placed number one on the list was November 2009.
