Couldn't tell...
The computer weighs over 105,000 lbs. and has over 5,000 processors...
DOE is trying to increase supercomputer power
faster than it otherwise would develop by paying
companies to collaborate with the nation's three big
nuclear weapons labs.
IBM got a $94 million contract in 1996 to build
Blue Pacific with the Livermore lab, a machine
designed to reach a speed of 4 teraflops. Silicon
Graphics, a company with a huge presence in the
supercomputing area with its Cray Research
division, is working with Los Alamos National
Laboratory in New Mexico on another 4-teraflop
machine called Blue Mountain. And Intel already
has its 1-teraflop machine up and running at Sandia
National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New
Mexico.
Wayne Pfeiffer of the San Diego Supercomputing
Center said the Livermore/IBM computer is the
world's fastest supercomputer as measured by
peak performance, but that the effort by Los
Alamos National Laboratory is likely to come in a
close second.
Both the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos
labs have been working hard to prepare their
performance scores in time for the upcoming SC
98 supercomputer conference, which will start on
November 7 in Orlando, Florida. When that
conference starts, the top 500 supercomputer list
will be updated.
More computers are on the way as part of DOE's
Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative. Last
February, DOE announced that IBM won another
contract, this one for a 10-teraflop machine called
"Option White" at Livermore. Also on tap is a
30-teraflop machine slated for LANL, and
ultimately, at the end of the 10-year, billion-dollar
program, a 100-teraflop machine.
IBM isn't always the first company that comes to
mind when speaking of supercomputers. But the
company does have a significant presence on the
June 1998 version of the top 500 supercomputers
list. And IBM believes it has room to grow,
Henesey said.
IBM's Scalable Parallel (the "SP" in the RS/6000
product name) architecture can extend all the way
up to 1,000 teraflops--a petaflop, or quadrillion
floating point operations per second.
IBM has 5,000 RS/6000 SP systems deployed
worldwide, Henesey said.
This week, the Los Alamos lab--historically a
good-natured competitor with its Livermore
sister--fully assembled its computer, Blue
Mountain, said LANL spokesman Jim
Danneskiold. Blue Mountain, with 6,144
processors, has been running weapons code
rewritten for the massively parallel machine as the
machine was reaching its full size.
Using one sixth of its total computing power, Blue
Mountain was able to run a simulated nuclear
weapons test that analyzed physics interactions in
an area divided into 30 million zones, he said. A
similar simulation on the tried-and-true Cray Y-MP
supercomputer was only able to run the simulation
with 2.5 million zones.
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