6. Sequoia BlueGene/Q (US) – $250 million
Again, the petascale BlueGene/Q supercomputer was developed by IBM for the NNSA, as part of the Advanced Simulation and Computing Program.
Developed in June 2012 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the supercomputer immediately became the world’s fastest supercomputer, according to TOP500.org.
It currently sits in the number three spot, with a theoretical peak of 20 PFLOPS, or 20 trillion calculations per second.
Sequoia was the first supercomputer to cross 10 petaFLOPS of sustained performance, and some record-breaking science applications have been run on the system.
Other purposes of the computer are to study astronomy, energy, human genome, climate change, and of course nuclear weapons.
