IBM's Sequoia has come out on top on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers for the US.

The newly installed system trumped Japan's K Computer made by Fujitsu which fell to second place, the BBC reported.It is the first time the US can claim pole position since it was beaten by China two years ago.

David Turek, vice president of deep computing at the firm, told the BBC his company had been preparing to retake the top spot for two years. Substantial planning went into this. We knew the day would come,” he said.

Sequoia is 1.55 times faster than the Fujitsu model, and uses over 1.5 million processors.

The Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers is released every six months and compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim in Germany, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. The latest list was released Monday at the 2012 International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

Sequoia is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. It was installed there in 2011 and will be fully deployed in 2012 for work on behalf of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The supercomputer was created for use by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which was established by Congress in 2000 to manage the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile and prevent nuclear proliferation, among other responsibilities.


China and Germany both have two supercomputers, while Japan, France and Italy have one.But IBM proved to be the leading manufacturer claiming five out of the top 10 spots.

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