The U.S. has reclaimed dominance in the list of the 500 fastest
supercomputers of the world. However, while DOE's Sequoia now
stands on top, the surprise may be that a powerful petaflop
supercomputer is now merely enough to land you a spot behind the
first 20. Sequoia towers the new list with almost 1.6 million
processing cores. With a peak performance of 20.1 petaflops, it
has nearly twice the capability of second place K computer with
11.3 petaflops -- though it consumes significantly less power
with 7.9 MWatts versus 12.7 MWatts. DOE Mira rounds out the top
3 and is a clone of Seqoia, albeit with half the processing
cores, half the processing capacity and half the power
consumption. China's Tianhe-1, which shocked the supercomputing
world in November 2010 with 4.7 pflops peak performance has
already dropped to the number 5 spot on the list. DOE's
Roadrunner was the world's first petaflop supercomputer and made
its debut on the June 2008 list. In just four years, the
industry was able increase the maximum p