Computer scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) have set a high performance computing speed record that opens the way to the scientific exploration of complex planetary-scale systems.

In a paper to be published in May, the joint team will announce a record-breaking simulation speed of 504 billion events per second on LLNL’s Sequoia Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, dwarfing the previous record set in 2009 of 12.2 billion events per second.

Sequoia has a peak performance of 25 petaflops and is the second fastest supercomputer in the world, with a total speed and capacity equivalent to about one million desktop PCs. A petaflop is a quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Read more.