US #1 on Top 500 Thanks to IBM

Looks like the US is back on top of the supercomputing game, thanks to IBM.

The latest edition of the Top 500 list includes the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Sequoia BlueGene/Q supercomputer, an IBM system that has 1.6 million compute cores capable of 16.32 petaflops.

Sequoia beat out Japan's K Computer for the number one spot on the list.

The June Top 500 list seems to indicate both a growth in the use of co-processors and GPUs. According to the list, 58 of the Top 500 supercomputers use accelerators — up from 39 six month ago — and 53 of those supercomputers use GPU chips.

Matthew Dublin is a senior writer at Genome Technology.