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Ranked among the world’s most powerful supercomputers, Sequoia supports two missions: quantify the uncertainties in numerical simulations of nuclear weapons performance and perform the advanced weapons science calculations needed to develop the accurate physics-based models for weapons codes. Sequoia is primarily water-cooled and significantly more energy efficient than comparable systems, which is essential to control operating costs.

Sequoia has been ranked at No. 1 and No. 2 on the Graph500 list since November 2012, indicating that it is one of the most efficient systems in the world for processing extremely vast (petabyte and exabyte-size) data sets. The Graph500 benchmark measures how quickly a system can search through a large data set—an important indicator of a system’s usefulness as computer scientists increasingly use supercomputers to analyze massive data-intensive workloads in addition to executing traditional modeling and simulation tasks. In June 2014, Sequoia traversed 16,599 billion edges per second