Terascale Simulation Facility

The Terascale Simulation Facility (TSF) has received a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gold level certification under the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) rating system. LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system that provides third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance in energy savings, water efficiency, carbon dioxide emissions reduction as well as other factors. more ...

The 23,504-square-meter (253,000-square-foot) TSF at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory houses the world's most powerful supercomputer—Sequoia. This amazing machine, which performs trillions of operations per second (teraFLOPS), supports the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program, a part of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and an important component of stockpile stewardship.

The south-facing front of the TSF has an atrium-like lobby (at left) and a silver-skinned "armadillo" auditorium (at right). The top floors of the offices of the TSF are visible behind the lobby and auditorium.

Supercomputers reside in the two computer rooms dominating the second level of the two-story supercomputer wing. A non-load-bearing wall separating the two rooms can be removed to create one large room should the need arise for more floor space for future ASC computers. Located on the ground floor beneath each computer room is a mechanical utility room. A total of 28 air-handling units blow cool air up to the second level, each at a rate of 80,000 cubic feet per minute. After cooling the computers, the air continues to rise upward and is forced into large return-air plenums for recirculation.

TSF's four-story office tower provides research and development areas for visualization and hardware prototyping, a 150-seat auditorium and visualization theater for unclassified presentations, a second visualization theater for classified reviews, and an operations hub that controls the Computation Directorate's high-performance computers across the Livermore site. It also includes three small computer rooms to support facility infrastructure, an atrium-like lobby, conference rooms, and a classroom. The facility houses more than 250 employees.

Built by M. A. Mortenson Construction Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota, the TSF was completed in late 2004, ahead of schedule and within budget. Photos and text documenting the pre-construction site view and artist's renderings, the groundbreaking, month-by-month construction progress, and the ribbon-cutting ceremony are available in the TSF Construction Scrapbook.

For more information about the TSF, read Terascale Simulation Facility: Built for Flexibility.