NNSA Sequoia supercomputer takes worlds fastest title, prevents nuclear testing

Fujitsu's 10.51 petaflop K supercomputer is pretty fast, but does it pack enough computational oomph to stave off underground nuclear testing? Probably -- but the NNSA's new sixteen petaflop rig does it better. According to the National Nuclear Security Administration, a supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, dubbed Sequoia, is now the fastest supercomputer on the planet, clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops. "Sequoia will provide a more complete understanding of weapons performance, notably hydrodynamics and properties of materials at extreme pressure sand temperatures," says NNSA Director of Advanced Simulation and Computing Bob Meisner, explaining that supercomputer simulations will "support the effort to extend the life of aging weapons systems." Translation? Sequoia will help the NNSA keep the US' nuclear stockpile stable without resorting to nuclear testing, or put simply, more computational power, fewer explosions. We can't think of a better thing to do with 98,304 compute nodes, 1.6 million cores and 1.6 petabytes of memory spread across 96 racks -- can you? Check out the official press release after the break.

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NNSA Sequoia supercomputer takes worlds fastest title, prevents nuclear testing originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jun 2012 03:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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