[4][5] As of November 2017[update], Sequoia had dropped to sixth place on the TOP500 ranking, while it was at third position on June 17, 2013, behind Tianhe-2 and Titan.

[11] Sequoia was used primarily for nuclear weapons simulation, replacing the current Blue Gene/L and ASC Purple supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Sequoia was also available for scientific purposes such as astronomy, energy, lattice QCD, study of the human genome, and climate change.

LLNL used the SLURM job scheduler, also used by the Dawn prototype and China's Tianhe-IA, to manage Sequoia's resources.

[16] In January 2013, Sequoia set the record for the first supercomputer using more than one million computing cores at a time for a single application.