It’s been three years since the U.S. could boast that it was home to the world’s most powerful supercomputer and now Americans can brag about this achievement again. The IBM-designed 

supercomputer called Sequoia is calling the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory home now, which takes the record for the fastest processing speeds away from Japan’s K Computer that was set last year. So the Sequoia has processing speeds of 16.32 petaflops vs the K Computer’s 10.5 petaflops.

The supercomputer is used by the U.S. Department of Energy and is a highly power efficient BlueGene/Q system running 1,572,864 core processors. It’s processing speeds are so fast that it puts high-end laptops with dual-or quad-core processors to shame, which average speeds of around 100 gigaflops (1,000,000 slower than one petaflop). This info comes to us courtesy of Top500, which records and publishes computing speeds. The K Computer is now No. 2 on their list. But America also houses other supercomputers on the list, with 253 of the fastest 500 computers here in the States