 | The BlueGene/L supercomputer performed a record 280.6 trillion operations per second on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark. |
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officially dedicated two new, next-generation supercomputers that will help ensure the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile remains safe and reliable without nuclear testing. The IBM machines will be housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
At an event in the LLNL Terascale Simulation Facility (TSF), the BlueGene/L supercomputer performed a record 280.6 trillion operations per second on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark. The supercomputing community uses the LINPACK benchmark application as the measure of performance to determine rankings on the Top 500 computer list.
Purple, the other half of the most powerful supercomputing twosome on earth, is a machine capable of 100 teraflops as it conducts simulations of a complete nuclear weapons performance. The IBM Power5 system is undergoing final acceptance tests at the TSF.
In a recent demonstration of its work capability, BlueGene/L ran a record-setting materials science application at 101.5 teraflops sustained over seven hours on the machine’s 131,072 processors, running an application of importance to NNSA’s effort to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent. A teraflop is 1 trillion computer operations per second.
Both machines were developed through NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program and join a series of other supercomputers at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories dedicated to NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship effort to maintain the nation's nuclear deterrent through science-based computation, theory and experiment.
Together, the Purple and BlueGene/L systems will put an astounding half of a petaflop, or half of a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) operations per second, peak performance at the disposal of scientists and engineers working at Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. This is more supercomputing power than at any other scientific computing facilities in the world.
