A massive liquid-cooled supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has received the bragging rights that come with being the world's most powerful calculating machine.

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.

Sequoia will simulate nuclear explosions to a degree that was previously impossible, but it will also give researchers insight into what's happening to weapons in the country's weapons stockpile without actually testing nuclear bombs.

"Supercomputers such as Sequoia have allowed the United States to have confidence in its nuclear weapons stockpile over the 20 years since nuclear testing ended in 1992," Lawrence Livermore said in a statement.

Sequoia was built by IBM, a company whose BlueGene/Q supercomputers are now resurgent. Back in November, the last time the Top500 list was published, there weren't any BlueGene systems in the top 10. Today, there are four, including an 8.2 petaflop system at Argonne National Laboratory and others in Italy and Germany.

Techs install Sequoia at Livermore's Terascale Simulation Facility in April 2012. Photo: IBM

Intel's Xeon chips rule the Top500 list, but Intel is now cooking up a new processor that's specially made for supercomputers. That chip, which Intel named Xeon Phi on Monday, will have more than 50 processor cores and should be capable of doing 1 trillion calculations per second when it starts shipping later this year.

Intel doesn't want to cede any ground to IBM in the high-performance computing market, because it sees this as a high-growth area over the next few years as more and more companies start using supercomputer-type programming for everything from financial modeling to movie-making to oil and gas exploration. "This represents a major growth segment for the business, and therefore a major area of investment into new capabilities and products," says Raj Hazra, the general manager of Intel's High Performance Computing Group.

When Sequoia is really firing on all cylinders, also sometime later this year, it will hit 20 petaflops per second. The way Livermore explains it, if every single person on earth worked nonstop on a calculator for an entire year, they could do the same number of calculations in 320 years that Sequoia cranks out in an hour.