WASHINGTON, DC - U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham
today announced that a supercomputer developed for the nation's Stockpile
Stewardship Program has attained a record breaking performance of 70.72
teraFLOP/s (trillion floating point operations per second) on the industry
standard LINPACK benchmark. Though the supercomputer is running at one
quarter its final size for the Department of Energy, the BlueGene/L (BG/L)
beta-System is already asserting US leadership in supercomputing.
A product of a multi-year research and development partnership between
the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
and IBM, BG/L will support the Stockpile Stewardship Program's mission
to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation's nuclear
weapons stockpile without underground nuclear testing.
“The delivery of the first quarter of the BlueGene/L system to Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory this month shows how a partnership between
government and industry can effectively advance national agendas in science,
technology, security and industrial competitiveness,” said Secretary
Abraham. “High performance computing is the backbone of the nation's
science and technology enterprise, which is why the Department has made
supercomputing a top priority investment. Breakthroughs in applied scientific
research are possible with the tremendous processing capabilities provided
by extremely scalable computer systems such as BlueGene/L.”
Scientific problems in chemistry, physics, and materials science require
an immense processing capability but frequently present relatively modest
memory requirements. For NNSA and its Advanced Simulation and Computing
program, the BlueGene/L machine is essential for understanding pressing
scientific issues including, most prominently, weapons aging. Additionally,
understanding material properties, higher resolution representations of
physics in three-dimensions, and achieving a tighter coupling of computational
science with experimental science are all issues that the BG/L architecture
is uniquely qualified to support through large-scale calculations.
Secretary Abraham added “BG/L will reduce the time-to-solution for
many computational problems, allowing DOE scientists to explore larger,
longer, and more complex problems than ever before. For example, a heroic
thirty-day calculation on what was the Number 3 supercomputer on the Top
500 list in summer of 2003 would now be completed on this quarter-size
BG/L system in about three days.”
The final BG/L system will exceed the performance of the Japanese Earth
Simulator by a factor of about nine while requiring one-seventh as much
electrical power, and one-fourteenth the floor space. These factors are
important because they will make it possible for more American university,
governmental, and industrial researchers to procure, operate, and use
effective supercomputers in the future.
Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a national
security laboratory managed by the University of California for the National
Nuclear Security Administration/Department of Energy. For more information
on LLNL, visit www.llnl.gov.
For more information on the Department of Energy, visit www.doe.gov.
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