New Super Computer Champ

Who needs the Olympics with competition this exciting?

With 1.5 million processing cores, Livermore’s Sequoia supercomputer weighs about the same as 30 elephants, and it can do more calculations per second than any machine ever built. 

How many? 16.3 quadrillion, according to benchmark numbers researchers at the national lab submitted for international supercomputing benchmarking contest called the Top500 list. In benchmarking terms, that translates to 16.3 petaflops per second. 

That blows away the reigning top supercomputer, Japan’s K computer, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science, which can deliver 10.5 petaflops per second.