The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) today unveiled the world's fastest computer, with the world's most powerful advanced graphics system. The machine, code named Blue Mountain, is located at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. Blue Mountain is the latest advancement in the Energy Department's stockpile stewardship program, which uses science-based methods to assess and certify the safety, securityand reliability of nuclear weapons without underground nuclear testing.
Blue Mountain ran Linpack, one of the computer industry's standard speed tests for big computers, at a fast 1.6 trillion operations per second (teraOps), giving it a claim to the coveted top spot on the TOP500 list, the supercomputer equivalent of the Indianapolis 500.
"Blue Mountain, and its record-breaking run, are great achievements and I congratulate our Los Alamos and Silicon Graphics team. This is significant progress in our effort to move stewardship of our nation's nuclear weapons from its 50-year foundation in nuclear testing to one based in science and simulation," said Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson. "These high-speed computing tools are necessary to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the stockpile without underground nuclear testing and help support the U.S. commitment to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Additionally, high-speed computing and simulation will lead to advances in medicine, manufacturing, automobile safety, and a greater understanding of weather patterns and global climate change."
"We are extremely proud to work with the Department of Energy and Los Alamos to develop the world's fastest supercomputer and advanced visualization system," said Silicon Graphics' Chief Executive Officer Richard Belluzzo. "By working with government on the world's most complex problems, Silicon Graphics is translating that experience into other applications that benefit all of humanity."
"SGI's Blue Mountain is the world's fastest computer and can generate fantastically large amounts of information," said Steve Younger, Associate Lab Director for Nuclear Weapons at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. "But once you have trillions of bits of information, you also need the world's most powerful visualization engines to extract knowledge from that data and see it in three dimensions."
Silicon Graphics has coupled into Blue Mountain the most advanced graphics system in the world, with technology similar to that of the SGI computers used to create the animated scenes in Antz and other motion pictures. With this visualization system, answers to complex scientific problems that would have taken weeks or more to display can now be displayed in minutes.
The Blue Mountain computer will give weapons scientists improved scientific tools to analyze the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. During 1999, Blue Mountain is expected to execute 80 million trillion operations over the course of thousands of simulations relating to the nuclear stockpile. This is roughly 10 times more computing than all the calculations executed in support of the U.S. stockpile from the development of the first atomic weapon under the Manhattan Project through 1992, the last year of underground testing.
The Department of Energy is developing five generations of high-performance computers as a part of its stockpile stewardship program with a goal of reaching 100 teraOps by 2004. Blue Mountain is the second of two DOE computers built with a peak speed of at least 3 teraOps. The first, Pacific Blue -- developed by IBM and located at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- has not yet been tested on Linpack. The Silicon Graphics Blue Mountain and the IBM-designed Pacific Blue systems use different computer architecture/system designs to reach these high speeds. Both computers were completed ahead of schedule and on budget.
At the heart of Blue Mountain are 48 commercially available Silicon Graphics® Cray® Origin2000 servers containing a total of 6,144 processors. Blue Mountain is organized into 48, 128-processor shared memory multi-processors, or SMPs. The system is designed so the cluster of 48 SMPs -- all commercially available servers -- behave like a single computer. These 48 SMPs can communicate with each other at world-record sustained speeds in excess of 650 gigabits a second. Blue Mountain's 128-processor, 16-pipe Onyx2 InfiniteReality® visualization capability is especially valuable because it is an integral part of Blue Mountain, not a separate unit. This visualization capability is twice that of the former record-holding visualization supercomputer, another system developed by Silicon Graphics.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and the Washington Division of URS for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.