IBM’s Sequoia is now the world’s fastest supercomputer with a peak performance of 16.32 petaflops, as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. Sequoia took the top spot on Top500 list (June 2012) announced at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg on Monday.

Update: According to latest Top500 list, Cray Inc.’s Titan is now the world’s fastest supercomputer.

IBM Sequoia ousted the previous record holder, Kei Computer, which was designed by Fujitsu and Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan having a peak performance of 10.51 petaflops.

Installed at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the new machine is deemed to be 1.5 times more efficient than Kei — capable of performing 16.32 petaflop calculations/s by utilizing its 1.57 million compute cores.

16.32 petaflop calculations = calculating in one hour what it would take 6.7 billion people around 320 years to manage with calculators.

Sequoia will be used to help simulate what will happen to aging nuclear weapons.

Specifications: