Laboratory file photo
Blue Mountain, the Laboratory's first supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing program, will be taken out of service at 8 a.m., Monday.
A major classified computing workhorse since it was commissioned in November 1998, Blue Mountain earned national attention for the Laboratory by enabling staff to run simulations of unprecedented size in support of national security programs.
"The Blue Mountain supercomputer was truly state of the art when it was installed in the first round of DOE's computer acquisitions for the ASCI program," said Chris Kemper, deputy division leader for the Computing, Communications and Networking (CCN) Division. With a peak speed of 3.1 trillion operations per second, Blue Mountain was the world's second fastest in June 1999, and remained among the 10 fastest supercomputers through November 2001.
During a three-day period during May 2000, more than 15,000 engineering simulations that required 10 hours each ran across 31 of Blue Mountain's 48 SGI Origin 2000 servers, thereby setting a world record by running 17.8 years of equivalent single-processor computing in just 72 hours.
Several newer and more powerful supercomputers, including ASCI Q and Lightning, now carry the Laboratory's classified computing workload.
Machine Theta, an unclassified system using similar technology, will be decommissioned at the same time. Users of Blue Mountain should move their work to the Q machine, while Machine Theta users should move their work to QSC, an unclassified Tru64 cluster from Hewlett-Packard Corp. Information and documentation about QSC and Q is available at http://computing.lanl.gov/ online. Training classes are available to help users with the transition.
"Although we build user environments to be similar across all the Laboratory's supercomputers, we recommend a hands-on training class for those making a transition to a new machine," said Harvey Wasserman, ASC training lead in High-Performance Computing Systems (CCN-7).
Blue Mountain originally consisted of 6,144 processors, although a portion of the machine was removed from service last May. Staff members in Networking Engineering (CCN-5) developed the technology for the Blue Mountain high-performance parallel interface, or HiPPI, which is the network that connects all of the processors to one another and which was the world's very first gigabit network. The HiPPI research was recognized with an R&D100 award as one of the top technical achievements of 1995 and the HiPPI team also received a Laboratory Distinguished Performance award.
For more information on the decommissioning of Blue Mountain and Theta, contact the Integrated Computing Network consultants at 5-4444, option 3. Information about user training and moving work to other computers is available at http://asci-training.lanl.gov online or by writing to consult@lanl.gov by electronic mail.