The IBM-developed Sequioa, installed at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory knocked Fujitsu's K Computer from the top spot, a position it had held for the last year.
The list is calculated using the Linpack benchmark, which measures computing power through a series of dense equations that most supercomputers are optimized to handle, giving a glimpse at the computer's peak performance output.
It was really no contest for Sequioa, which displayed an impressive 16.3 petaflop/s, displaying 1.55 times the power of the K Computer, which managed 10.51 petaflop/s. The only other computer to come close to the top 2 in terms of raw power was Mira, another new American addition to the list. The IBM (which developed 5 of the top 10 systems on the list) BlueGene/Q system handled 8.15 petaflop/s.
Despite grabbing 2 of the top 3 positions with new supercomputers, the U.S actually lost its stranglehold on the top 10 from last November's list, in which they housed 5 of the top 10 supercomputers in the world. That tally is now down to 3, with Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar (once the top supercomputer in the world itself) grabbing the 6th spot. Rounding out the top 10 are China and Germany with 2 each, and Japan (the K Computer), France, and Italy with once each.
In a display of how quickly raw computing power continues to surge, the last supercomputer on the newest list, in 500th place with 60.8 teraflop/s, would've come in at 332nd just 7 months ago.
Likewise, compared to the top performing computer on the first ever list back in 1993, the CM-5/1024, the current top performer Sequioa is 273,930 times faster than it.
