Sequoia (supercomputer)

Sequoia
OperatorsLLNL
LocationLivermore, California,
United States
Power7.9 MW
Operating systemCNK operating system
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Space3,000 square feet (280 m2)
Memory1.5 PiB
Speed20.13 PFLOPS
CostUS$250 million[1] (undisclosed by IBM[2]); equivalent to $339 million in 2023
PurposeNuclear weapons, astronomy, energy, human genome, and climate change

IBM Sequoia was 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.[3] Sequoia was dismantled in 2020, its last position on the top500.org list was #22 in the November 2019 list.

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 17.17 petaflops, 63% 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.[4][5]

As of November 2017, Sequoia had dropped to sixth place on the TOP500 ranking, while it was at third position on June 17, 2013, behind Tianhe-2 and Titan.[6]

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,[7] while the Cardioid code,[8][9] which models the electrophysiology of the human heart, achieved nearly 12 petaflops with a near real-time simulation.

The entire supercomputer ran 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.[10]

  1. ^ Brodkin, John (June 18, 2012). "With 16 petaflops and 1.6M cores, DOE supercomputer is world's fastest". Ars Technica. Retrieved August 17, 2019.
  2. ^ "IBM US nuke-lab beast 'Sequoia' is top of the flops". The Register.
  3. ^ NNSA awards IBM contract to build next generation supercomputer, February 3, 2009
  4. ^ "TOP500 Press Release: Lawrence Livermore's Sequoia Supercomputer Towers above the Rest in Latest TOP500 List". TOP500. July 14, 2012. Archived from the original on August 7, 2012.
  5. ^ Naveena Kottoor (June 18, 2012). "BBC News – IBM supercomputer overtakes Fujitsu as world's fastest". BBC News.
  6. ^ "China's Tianhe-2 Supercomputer Takes No. 1 Ranking on 41st TOP500 List". TOP500. June 17, 2013.
  7. ^ S. Habib; V. Morozov; H. Finkel; A. Pope; K. Heitmann; K. Kumaran; T. Peterka; J. Insley; D. Daniel; P. Fasel; N. Frontiere; Z. Lukic (2012). "The Universe at Extreme Scale: Multi-Petaflop Sky Simulation on the BG/Q". arXiv:1211.4864 [cs.DC].
  8. ^ "Cardioid Cardiac Modeling Project".
  9. ^ "Venturing into the Heart of High-Performance Computing Simulations".
  10. ^ "IBM supercomputer overtakes Japan's Fujitsu as world's fastest". TechSpot. June 18, 2012.