Sequoia (supercomputer)

Sequoia was a petascale IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer built for the National Nuclear Security Administration under its Advanced Simulation and Computing Program. It was delivered to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2011 and fully deployed in June 2012. That month the TOP500 committee ranked it the fastest supercomputer in the world, with a LINPACK result of 17.17 petaflops against 10.51 for the K computer it replaced, while drawing 7.9 megawatts. The system had 96 racks holding 98,304 compute nodes, each a 16-core A2 processor with 16 gigabytes of memory, which came to 1,572,864 cores and 1.5 pebibytes of memory, joined in a five-dimensional torus. It ran entirely on Linux, with the CNK kernel on the compute nodes and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on 768 I/O nodes attached to a Lustre filesystem. Applications on it were the first to pass 10 petaflops sustained. Sequoia was dismantled in 2020, its last TOP500 place being 22nd in November 2019.