One of IBM's line of Bluegene clusters, Sequoia has taken the top spot in the Top 500 list away from Japan's K-Computer. Powered by IBM's Power chips, the Sequoia cluster made its debut six months ago, coming in at the 17th spot, but thanks to an almost three-fold increase in core count the Linux based cluster has managed to blow the K-Computer out of the water.

IBM's Sequoia is installed at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and clocked a Rmax Linpack score of 16.3PFLOPS, 60 per cent higher than that of the K-Computer, which was the first cluster to break the 10PFLOPS barrier last year. While IBM is riding high on the Top 500, Intel is feeling the pressure as Xeon based systems feature in only four of the clusters in the top 10 and none of the top three.


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