US supercomputer is world\'s fastest Livermore - Arabstoday   An IBM supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California was ranked the world\'s most powerful computer, officials said. Clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops, or quadrillion floating point operations per second, the Sequoia supercomputer earned the No. 1 ranking on the industry-standard Top500 list of the world\'s fastest supercomputers at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, eWeek.com reported Monday. The computer, built for the National Nuclear Security Administration, is dedicated to NNSA\'s Advanced Simulation and Computing program for stewardship of the nation\'s nuclear weapons stockpile, a joint effort of the LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, IBM said. \"Computing platforms like Sequoia help the United States keep its nuclear stockpile safe, secure, and effective without the need for underground testing,\" NNSA Administrator Thomas D\'Agostino said in a statement. Supercomputer simulations are vital to addressing non-proliferation and counterterrorism issues as well as informing other national security decisions such as nuclear weapon policy and treaty agreements, officials said. Sequoia is primarily water-cooled and consists of 96 racks, 98,304 compute nodes, 1.6 million processor cores and 1.6 petabytes of memory.