IBM's BlueGene / Q System Is Fastest Supercomputer

Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q System using 1,572,864 processor cores, scored 16.32 petaflop/s on the Linpack Benchmark, the yardstick used to measure such things. The incumbent top dog, Fujitsu’s “K Computer” in Kobe, Japan, came in second with a 10.51 Pflop/s score using 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores. Another IBM BlueGene/Q system called Mira, which scored 8.15 petaflop/s using 786,432 cores, was ranked third. (See chart for the top ten or here’s the complete list.) Kaggle's Heritage competition for $3,000,000 prize is an excellent usage of processing power. I'd like to rent some R time on that beast.